Chapter ch01. Critical Thinking Exercise

The “Weighting” Game

Tanya and Maysoun have been good friends since meeting as first-year students in their freshman dormitory. Although they are about the same height and age, their body weights are very different. Tanya, whose parents are both obese, has always had a BMI between 30 and 35. Although acquaintances assume that she is lazy, lacks willpower, and is a gluttonous eater, Tanya’s close friends know that she is none of these. Maysoun’s BMI has nearly always hovered around 20, as has that of both her mother and father.

As a project in their health psychology class, Tanya and Maysoun decided to make themselves the subjects of an experiment. For one month, the two friends ate the same total number of calories per day spread across several small, healthy meals that were low in fat and included plenty of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. They also added a 30-minute aerobics class to their daily routines. At the end of the month, Tanya and Maysoun weighed themselves for the first time since beginning the project. Although Tanya was delighted to find that she had lost some weight, Maysoun had lost more. When the two young women presented their results to the class, several students suggested that Tanya had either “fudged” on her diet by underestimating her daily food intake or simply hadn’t employed as much willpower as Maysoun had, and that was why Maysoun lost more weight.