Study: Michelle Obama's anti-obesity campaign may actually make people gain weight

(Image credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images)

A new study conducted by public health researchers in the United States and United Kingdom found that people who discover they are overweight are likely to gain more weight than those who don't realize they need to lose a few pounds. In other words, anti-obesity awareness campaigns, like the Let's Move! program spearheaded by First Lady Michelle Obama, can do more harm than good.

Published in the International Journal of Obesity, the study examined data on 14,000 American and British adults over periods of seven to ten years. It "found consistent evidence that perceiving oneself as being overweight was associated with increased weight gain," often thanks to stress-based overeating following the revelation.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.