How Your Favorite Sports Teams Can Make You Fat

Mens Health – Notice your buddy’s belly poking out of his Browns jersey? This might explain it: You’re more likely to eat unhealthy foods the day after your favorite football team loses, according to new French research. Fans of losing teams consumed 10 percent more calories than usual the day after a game, the research found. (And the bigger the team’s losing deficit, the more people ate.) But fans of winners translate feelings to their food choices, too: Caloric intake went down 5 percent in spectators whose teams were victorious. We know it’s just a correlation, but after doing some research, we did find that St. Louis, Jacksonville, Cleveland, Detroit, and Nashville—all cities with perennially bad NFL teams—placed in the bottom half of a Gallup-Heathways poll tracking obesity in 190 of the United States’ biggest metro areas. Meanwhile, San Francisco, Denver, and Boston—towns with traditionally successful NFL franchises—were among the least obese areas. So why do losers drown their sorrows in food? Research suggests you adopt the identity of the team you root for. Taking wins and losses personally affects self-regulation, making you more likely to stuff your face with handfuls of chips.

I

am

fucked.

I’ve already been putting on depression pounds from the Mets. Jets haven’t even played a snap yet and I’m ahead of the game. Friday September 13th I’m gonna look like the Gluttony victim from Se7en. Just gonna eat myself to death.