What is the average amount of weight do you need to lose in order for others to find you more attractive? New research has been done on this and folks from the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto decided to find out how much.

They showed participants a collection of digitally created photos of male and female faces that looked between 20 and years old.


Each face was given different amounts of facial fat and placed in a sequence of increasing scale.



The participants were asked to determine which faces were heavier-looking from randomly drawn pairs of images.



They found that women and men of average height need to gain or lose about three and a half and four kilograms, or about eight and nine pounds, respectively, for anyone to see it in their face, but they need to lose about twice as much for anyone to find them more attractive.



They determined a change of at least 1.33 kg/m2 in BMI was required to make a weight change noticeable.



The average decrease in weight needed to be more attractive was 2.38 kg/m2, or 14 pounds for women and 2.56kg/m2, or 18 pounds for men.