By Nazia Khan

Distribution Manager

Most people want to get married and start new life with the person they love, but sometimes marriage ends in divorce. Marriage and divorce can be the cause of weight gain.

According to a study done at Ohio State University, marriage is a trigger for weight gain among women who get married when they are thirty to fifty years of age.

Men tend to gain weight if they get a divorce during the years from thirty to fifty years of age.

Marriage and divorce are considered “weight shocks”.  Although from the ages of fifty years and older weight shocks are increased. Zhenchao Qian and Dmitry Tumin are the two lead researchers who conducted this study.

These weight gains can increase so much that it can cause a health risk. Single men and women or couples in their twenties are not in as much risk as couples past thirty years of age.

Tumin and Qian had used data from the “National Longitudinal Survey of Youth ’79” to compare to their study. The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth ‘79 had men and women from the ages of 14 to 22 in 1979.

Although for their experiment, they had used more than ten thousand people from the years of 1986 to 2008.

In their experiment, they Tumin and Qian had separated the people into four different groups according to how much they weight they gained or lost.

The groups were people who had a “Body Mass Increase” or BMI decrease of 1kg/m2, which is about 7 pounds of a person that is 5’10”.

The second group was people who had a small BMI increase which is about 7 to 20 pounds for somebody who are 5’10”.

People who had a large BMI increase which is about 21 pounds and people who didn’t gain or lose any weight were the last two groups.

They used these people to conclude if weight was gained two years after marriage or divorce.  Some people would think that there are many factors that could cause the gain or loss of weight such as a pregnancy, well Tumin and Qian had accounted for any other possible factors. Qian said

“Married women often have a larger role around the house than men do, and they may have less time to exercise and stay fit than similar unmarried women”.

During a marriage, sometimes men can lose weight instead of gaining it; there is no clear explanation why that is.

“As you get older, having a sudden change in your life like a marriage or a divorce is a bigger shock than it would have been when you were younger, and that can really impact your weight” Tumin said.