STUDY OF THE WEEK: The Cold Winter Months Are Hell on Your Waistline

New England really knows how to dish it out. We already knew that dark, blustery winters made you depressed. Now it turns out darkness might also encourage binge eating.

Joseph A. Kasof—a researcher at University of California, Irvine who earned his Ph.D. at Harvard—recently conducted a study of about 400 UC students that found darkness “correlated positively with bulimic behavior in restrained eaters.” In the dark, he found, these people tend to binge more than purge.

Kasof says that dim light might not be the only cause of seasonal changes in binge eating.

The study references a prior report that found a relation between overeating and seasonal change. “It was well done, and it found amazingly high correlations between the frequency of binge eating and seasonal variation in the brightness of ambient lighting,” says Kasof.

With weeks of dark skies in October and snow before Halloween, the forecast for Cambridge seems bleak. Protest as you will that you need the fat to keep warm, the cold winter months might leave you with a sluggish mile time and a muffin top.

But don’t worry. Like a crappy Springfest, you can just blame it on the weather.