Slate:

If you are overweight, you are not necessarily destined to be sad, says a new study from the University of Colorado–Boulder. The paper comes out today in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, and it tracks the three-way relationship between obesity, life satisfaction, and where you live. It finds, perhaps unsurprisingly, that obese men and women who live in U.S. counties with high levels of obesity are much happier than obese men and women who live in slenderer areas....

“Where obesity is more common, there is less difference among obese, severely obese, and non-obese individuals’ life satisfaction,” the researchers write, “but where obesity is less common, the difference in life satisfaction between the obese (including the severely obese) and non-obese is greater. In that light, obesity in and of itself does not appear to be the main reason obese individuals tend to be less satisfied with their lives than their non-obese peers. Instead, it appears to be society’s response to or stigmatization of those that are different from what is seen as ‘normal’ that drives this relationship.”

Knock it off, skinny people.