SYRACUSE, NY – While for years it has been jokingly asserted, by college girls and office colleagues, that calories don’t count on holidays or birthdays, recent studies show that actually the opposite may be true.
What started as a fun extra credit assignment carried out by a Psych 101 class, consisting of a fair share of Tri Delts and Sig Kaps, has returned some shocking results. The experiment was simple. The class would celebrate the birthday of each of their peers together and record the weight they gained from the night of festivities. They were not naive. Their hypothesis was of course that calories counted on holidays and birthday but they thought it would be a great class bonding experience so they all went along with it. But what happened next would shake the class to their core. Literally.
On Saturday September 29th, the class gathered at The Purple Nurple for their first celebration of the school year. It was Sally Janeson’s birthday so she had been required to track her calorie intake for the day. After a night of throwing back mixed drinks and the famous Purple Nurple shots, the students were eager to find out the results of Sally’s calorie count on Monday morning. But when morning came, the eagerness was quickly diluted. Just like a Nurpie (which is of course the signature mixed drink from The Purple Nurple consisting of 10% Vodka and 90% grenadine). Sally had gained 10 pounds between her Saturday and Sunday morning weigh-ins. The class initially shook this off. Her scale must be calibrated incorrectly. Or maybe she misread the number. To be fair, it was early in the morning. Regardless, outliers are bound to occur in experiments and they had a semester’s worth of birthdays to correct this mistake.
But it was no mistake. Four more birthdays and four more late nights out at The Purple Nurple and a trend was forming. Students were making extraordinary weight gains on their birthday. The students were now thoroughly confused but were not going to give up. As the holidays were fast approaching, the class agreed to consume the same exact diet during the week leading up to the holiday break as they consumed during the break itself. Each student would record their daily calorie intake and weight gain. The results were damning. Each student gained double the weight during the holiday break than they did during the week prior.
Returning from break, dismayed and confused, the students turned to the person who was most accomplished in the field of science on campus; Jenny who works the bar at The Purple Nurple on Friday nights. After careful analysis and plenty of Nurpies, Jenny came to a conclusion: Each person’s body has a happiness requirement that they try to meet during birthdays and the holidays. The bodies’ requirement is substantially higher on these days than on an average day and thus the body is forced to produce additional endorphins to meet this requirement. Since expectations of happiness on these days are unrealistic, the body simply doesn’t have enough natural endorphins to complete the job and thus it must borrow from other hormones in the body. It was found that on these days of increased happiness-stress, the body was turning fat burning hormones into endorphins. Thus, in summation, while you are on vacation, so is your metabolism.
Jenny went on to be published five more times in various scientific journals before being promoted to manager at The Purple Nurple.
