A new study suggests that certain weight-control behaviors may actually contribute to weight problems. And parents who are overweight may contribute to their adolescent's future weight problem, say the researchers. The study appears in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology and was authored by Eric Stice of the University of Texas. Stice and his co-authors found that adolescent girls who were depressed and had obese parents were more likely to become obese. On the other hand, the authors found that eating high fat foods, binge eating or infrequent exercise were not as much linked to predicting future obesity as might be expected. But other weight-control behaviors, especially those that involved vomiting or laxative abuse, promoted weight gain more than weight loss, said Stice. The researchers said that these behaviors can lead to increased metabolic efficiency or alter the homeostatic processes. Erratic eating also promotes weight gain because a person does not get regular delivery of nutrients, said Stice, which can alter a person's physiological responses and disrupt a person's normal appetite pattern.
Symptoms of depression also contributed to weight gain among adolescent girls. Besides the reasons for overeating to comfort or distract one's self, this finding in the study also showed that lack of serotonin that is usually inherent in depression also leads individuals to consume excessive amounts of carbohydrate-rich foods in an effort to regulate his or her serotonin levels.
Interestingly, an adolescent's perception of her parents' weight also predicted the likelihood of the adolescent gaining weight. Those adolescents who reported having an obese parent were more than four times at risk for becoming obese themselves versus their peers who reported not having obese parents.
