An unlucky new study courtesy of the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research has found that, on the whole, people who believe in luck — black cats sauntering across their paths, breaking mirrors, walking under ladders, or not simply waiting for all those pennies you dropped in your kitchen to eventually turn heads up — are more likely to live unhealthy lifestyles, since they believe life is just a crazy, random amusement ride with a whole section missing near the end and over which they have absolutely no control. Believing in luck, so this research suggests, is antithetical to bootstraps and rugged self-reliance.
According to Deborah Cobb-Clark, director of the Melbourne Institute, a link exists between people who let themselves buy snake oil to ward off all that black cat crossing guard luck and poor health. In other words, she explains, people are fat because they believe in luck rather than willpower, grit, and whatever other virtue people who spend four hours a day heaving kettlebells overhead and grunting like oxen:
The main policy response to the obesity epidemic has been the provision of better information, but information alone is insufficient to change people's eating habits. Understanding the psychological underpinning of a person's eating patterns and exercise habits is central to understanding obesity.
All those overweight people who think they just got stuck with a bad roll of the loaded gene dice are clearly kidding themselves. They just need better access to information, like pamphlets and Nordic personal trainers because thin people, well, just look at them! Clearly they have everything figured out because they're sinewy enough to slip through wormholes and collect all the secrets of space and time.
Meanwhile, in the gender-specific portion of the study, researchers found that men wanted more often to see real, physical results from exercise, whereas women were content just to know that they were probably going to outlive most men anyway, but with exercise they would live to like a hundred and fifty.
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