"Spring is the best time to lose weight": Evidence that dieting is seasonal and reaches peak intensity during Spring.

Does dieting intensify during Spring? Previous research suggests that body dissatisfaction is seasonal and peaks during Summer. Extending these findings to seasonal dieting, we contend that individuals' apprehensions about heightened Summertime body dissatisfaction motivate Springtime dieting. To detect seasonal dieting, we examined the seasonal frequencies of 69 dieting hashtags within a database of 564 million tweets originating from the United States and spanning eight calendar years (2012-19). In total, we detected 628,355 dieting hashtags. Of these, 30% occurred during Spring, 20% during Autumn/Fall, and 25% during each of Summer and Winter. During Spring, there were ~64,000 additional dieting hashtags compared with Autumn/Fall, and ~32,000 additional hashtags compared with Summer and Winter. Of the nine most common dieting hashtags that together accounted for 96% of the total, all nine peaked during Spring (ps < 0.0001). This Spring-centric pattern was apparent for both appearance-oriented diets (e.g., "atkins" and "weightwatchers") and ostensibly non-appearance-oriented diets (e.g., "vegan" and "glutenfree"), suggesting that non-appearance-oriented diets might nonetheless be co-opted for appearance-oriented purposes. In conclusion, we found credible evidence that dieting intensifies during Spring. Future research should examine whether eating disorders and muscle dysmorphia also intensify during Spring because dieting is intrinsic to both these conditions.

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Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

Conflict of interest All authors have participated in (a) conception and design, or analysis and interpretation of the data; (b) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and (c) approval of the final version. This manuscript has not been submitted to, nor is under review at, another journal or other publishing venue. The authors have no affiliation with any organization with a direct or indirect financial interest in the subject matter discussed in the manuscript. The authors have no affiliations with organizations with direct or indirect financial interest in the subject matter discussed in the manuscript.