Starbucks, which may hope its new calorie listings will create demand amongst the calorie conscious, should love graphs like this one from HitWise:
As you might expect, the chart shows an increase in online searches for “calories” and “diets” the first week in January, when resolutions are fresh.
You might think that an April spike in “calories” searches is simply a harbinger of bikini season — but there’s no correlating spike this time with “diets.”
Does this mean that people are becoming more calorically aware — or perhaps replacing their fad diets with monetary incentives?
(Hat tip: Bill Tancer)
and 
. You can also watch it on 
Why all the doom and gloom, friends? Clearly people simply choose their diet by March, continue to take interest in it by searching for calorie content information on the foods they eat, and have lost the desired amount of weight by November. Then Thanksgiving rolls around, and then Christmas, and a bird and a hog later they are able to restart this great anthropogenic, self-flagellatory tradition….
[singing]
“America! America! God mend thine ev’ry flaw;
Confirm thy soul in self control, thy liberty in law!
OK Ape-ish-
I would like to see the variable weight gain added as a control. My friend likes the expression “live long and prosper” but as she get’s older, she seems to be growing wider and wider on her no carb diet. So I agree, we are a “how do” leaden culture, but in the case of my friend, her liberty or control has caged her into a bigger and bigger box frame.
The difference between the two lines in the spring and summer is interesting. It suggests that paying attention to calories may be a more persistent behavior (and thus more effective) than dieting.
On the other hand, once you go on a diet you may get the hang of it pretty quickly and no longer need to google the word.
In any case, there’s still that huge seasonal difference. There are plenty of articles in Cosmopolitan on slimming down for summer, but I’ve never seen one entitled “Ten Tips on Fattening Up for Winter.”