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One Hundred Thousand Sympathy Calories: This Super Bowl, You're Getting Fat

The Super Bowl is upon us and, as usual, it's time to reflect on how little the actual game matters in the midst of all the spectacle. If you're team's not in it, or you're not hate-cheering, like many viewers of this year's game will be, or you just...
I know Haynesworth isn’t on the Patriots anymore, but until JaMarcus Russell joins the team, Albert will be the Fat Pat.

The Super Bowl is upon us and, as usual, it’s time to reflect on how little the actual game matters in the midst of all the spectacle. If you’re team’s not in it, or you’re not hate-cheering, like many viewers of this year’s game will be, or you just don’t give a shit about football but want an excuse to get day drunk with your friends, there’s already a plethora of entertainment to keep the whole tradition alive and the Bud/Coors/Miller Light flowing. As long as people are still snorting Cheeto dust while betting on the Puppy Bowl, the Super Bowl will still be a thing.

The ultimate irony of it all is that, even as you watch highly-tuned athletic machines rip each other apart on screen, you’ll be spending the day skulling beers and shoving processed food in your maw. You probably won’t even remember the game. I, for one,know that I saw the Falcons play in a Super Bowl years ago, but I’ve forgotten the game, score, and other team in favor of memories of the Dirty Bird, a keg, and a 10-foot sandwich.

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The only proof that you even enjoyed the Super Bowl experience is likely to be a roaring hangover and a swollen colon. Blame it on those vaunted ads, if you like: Jon Eick, writing for PBS, added up the caloric content of food and drink advertisements aired during past Super Bowls and found that you’re getting visually pounded with tens of thousands of delicious calories every game.

Eick calculated that, during the Super Bowl, food and beverage ads showcased 106,000 calories worth (see footnote) of products in 2011, and double that in 2010. If you ate everything on the TV, that would have been worth a gain of 30 and 60 pounds, respectively. And not only does the food look better on TV, but everyone eating it is incredibly attractive. It’s enough to make one think – after the first six pack – that the only reasons you’re not getting down with models is the lack of flavor in your beer and the chronic undercheesing you’re suffering at the hands of your pizza overlords. The spread of dip, chips, wings, and booze sitting in front of you becomes too tantalizing to avoid. It’s making you a better person, you tell yourself. It’s also making you a roomy one.

But it’s not just ad-induced desire that’s making you fat. It’s also your social awkwardness. It turns out that, if you’re a people pleaser, you’re likely to shovel down the jalapeño poppers because it makes you fit in. A new report in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology states that, in groups, people with a predisposition to try to keep social interactions smooth and happy are likely to keep eating even when they don’t really want to just to keep others comfortable.

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“People-pleasers feel more intense pressure to eat when they believe that their eating will help another person feel more comfortable,” lead author Julie Exline said. “Almost everyone has been in a situation in which they’ve felt this pressure, but people-pleasers seem especially sensitive to it.”

What’s really twisted about that whole thing is that the people-pleasers studied felt worse about themselves after indulging because they broke their own willpower, not because the food was tasty, but solely because they felt nervous about going against the grain and making their fat-ass friends feel awkward about their own overeating. So while Tubby George on the couch only feels bad about eating a whole deep-dish pizza during the game because it’s making him fatter (a feeling easily swept under the rug with more beer), the empathetic amongst are eating to please, which causes them to hate themselves more.

When you apply that to this Super Bowl environment, you’re surely screwed because the only people who care about this game are assholes anyway. Imagine: You’re sitting there with your obnoxious, jerkass Giants- and Patriots-fan friends (with whom you’re now wondering why you hang out) while you, to your credit, loudly hope that their prissy teams fail miserably.

That’s a recipe for friendship disaster, especially considering the persecution complex both teams’ fans have. So you’ve got to find a safe ground to bond over to keep the friendship together. In this case, that means beer and food. Considering the tendencies those teams’ fans have towards alcoholism and obesity, it actually means a lot of beer and food. So you dutifully get drunk and stuffed, all because you don’t want your friends to hate you. That all means that come Monday, you’re liable to be a bit more portly, if not depressed. But, hey, they don’t call it the Super Bowl for nothing.

Update: An earlier version of this piece mentioned 60,000 calories shown in ads per game, which, as Josh Sweeney pointed out, would have only meant a gain of 17 pounds. That 60,000 calorie number was actually a total of average per-ad caloric content for six products that Eick used for comparison. Bud Light averaged the highest per-commercial calorie content according to Eick, with about 30,000 calories of beer per ad.