A research study from Doshisha University, Japan, as published in BioMed Central's open access journal, BioPsychoSocial Medicine, has reveled that personality traits, especially feeling too optimistic about weight loss can actually harm the amount of weight loss that occurs.

The study ran over a 6 month peruiod and monitored 101 obese patients undergoing a weight loss programme that included counselling, nutrition guidance and exercise sessions.

Patients' psychosocial characteristics were assessment both before and after attending the clinic using psychological questionnaires designed to identify patients' personality types.

Throughout the study the weight loss programme improved optimism and self-orientation characteristics but the most weight loss occured in the group of people that developed a strong self-awareness via the counselling sessions rather than those people who started the programme with a strong sense of optimism.

This reasearch study result supports previous findings that some negative emotion has a positive effect on behavior modification because patients care more about their disease. However, the overall improvement in optimistic ego state is not necessarily detrimental, as this increased optimism should result in patients maintaining the healthy lifestyle achieved at the clinic.