A study in the aptly-named journal Apetite has revealed that fat chicks just can’t control themselves in the same way that skinny chicks can.

Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Department of Psychology have performed an interesting study on that very telling attribute of one’s personality: the ability to delay gratification.

Even pigeons can learn to resist the temptation of immediate gratification if promised a greater reward, but overweight women, according to the study, experienced marked difficulty accomplishing a similar task, except in this case bird seed was replaced with large sums of money.

It was found that obese women discounted the value of future rewards at a rate three-to-four times greater than that of the normal-weight women, confirming that their wanton impulsivity was pretty much ‘off the scale’, so to speak.

What was immensely interesting was that obese men did not exhibit similar impulsivity, prompting consternation among the researchers.

Also of tangential interest is that IQ is proportional to the ability to delay gratification (generally speaking), which perhaps makes us take the claims of avian psychologists more seriously and those of the fatosphere less seriously, but ultimately doesn’t shed any light on anything.

Back to the sex differences regarding eating-related disinhibition, does this mean that there are more fat women than fat men? I’ll look into that later, but going on personal observations I think this is probably true. I see a lot more fat women than men on a daily basis, and I know most of the women I interact with will cave to the desire for chocolate or cake or chocolate cake at the drop of a hat.

Obesity aside, this research tells us that in general, women are more impulsive than men, and therefore can’t be trusted in mission-critical situations, one of the reasons our insightful forefathers erected a glass ceiling between women and the stuff that really matters.

Adapted from materials provided by Eurekalert