winter equals weight gain

Question: Do people gain winter weight?

Answer: Temperatures start to fall, the days get shorter and people put on weight. The reason is that when the weather gets colder, the blood vessels in the skin contract, and as the extremities cool, blood moves to the center of the body. There it stimulates internal organs like the digestive tract, and their activity increases. When the digestive tract grows more active, appetite increases, and if the appetite increases, so does weight. That change is entirely natural. It's a time-honored belief that fall is a time for horses to get fat, and for people as well.

Seen from the perspective of Eastern medicine, fall is the season to store energy. It is the time of the most nutritious food, when we harvest all the grains and fruits that have stored up a year's worth of energy. In spring and summer, people are afflicted with a lack of energy thanks to the unstable balance between yin and yang energy, but fall is a time for our bodies to stabilize. As the cool wind blows, the sweat cools and the yin-yang balance in our bodies is restored, and we begin to store up fat for winter. But that also means that people who want to lose weight have to be particularly careful in the fall.

That is true even if people now wear long sleeves in summer and short sleeves in winter because they spend most of their time in temperature-controlled environments that erode the distinctive nature of the seasons. Our lives may be less in thrall to seasonal changes as they once were, but some constants remain.