Watching Sad Movies is Making You Fat

Lead researcher Brian Wansink says watching sad movies makes it more difficult for your pants to fit.

Think about it. When you plop on the couch with a bag of chips and watch television or a movie, how many chips did you eat? Do you know? Of course not, you just keep eating until the flavors don't make sense any more. It's almost like staring at your face in the mirror for more than 45 seconds. It starts to not look like your face even though it is. Picking up what I'm throwing down?

It all starts with mindless eating. Where we just eat to eat.

But Brian Wansink and a team of researchers took it a step further saying that the type of movie you are watching may determine how much you eat.

In a lab, Cornell Food and Brand Lab studied how much people ate while watching two different movies. Movie goers ate 28 percent more popcorn while watching the tearjerker "Love Story" than the comedy "Sweet Home Alabama."

Researchers then went to theaters and did a bit of dumpster diving at a theater as well. What they found was that people at 55 percent more popcorn when they were watching a sad movie as opposed to a comedy.

Why does this happen? Well Brian Wansink's theory is that eating can be triggered by emotion and people will eat more to compensate for sadness.

That explains it. That's why my pants don't fit. I have to stop watching all of the sad videos on YouTube.