According to the latest research obese women are more impulsive than other females but this does not apply to obese men.
The new study found that obese women display significantly weaker impulse control than normal-weight women, but between obese and normal-weight men, the impulsivity levels are nearly the same.
The study by researchers at the University of Alabama, Birmingham aimed to find out how obese and normal-weight men and women differed in their decision-making skills, specifically in delay discounting, which is a measure of how much an individual is driven by immediate gratification as against the willingness to wait for delayed but greater rewards.
The researchers from the Department of Psychology involved 95 men and women in the study and gave them the choice of receiving varying hypothetical amounts of money immediately or fixed hypothetical amounts of money to be received after delays of two weeks, one month, six months or one, three, five or 10 years.
These hypothetical rewards ranged from $1,000 to $50,000 and the researchers found that obese women discounted the value of future rewards at a rate three-to-four times greater than that of normal-weight women, suggesting greater impulsivity.
Obese men and the male and female control subjects however, all showed similar levels of delay discounting and the results remained the same, even when differences in IQ and income, both of which have been found to be related to measures of impulsivity, were accounted for.