How your friends make you fat—the social network of weight

One of the big health news stories of 2007 was a study showing that your friends influence the size of your waist (and the rest of your body). Like any study, it raised as many questions as it answered, including whythis happens. A new study from Arizona State University looked into that question by testing three pathways by which friends might influence one another’s body size:

source

1. Collaboration. Over time, you might start to share the ideas of the people close to you after talking with them about what the proper body size is. Then you might choose your food and exercise habits in order to reach that body size, whether that means eating more food to look like your plus-sized friends, or less food to look like your thin ones.
2. Peer pressure. You feel bullied into trying to look like your friends and family members. They make you feel bad about your body, so you go about eating and exercising to look like them.
3. Monkey see, monkey do. You change your habits to mirror those of your friends without necessarily thinking or talking about an ideal body weight. Alexandra Brewis Slade, PhD, one of the Arizona State researchers, gave an example of this pathway that most of us can relate to: You’re at a restaurant with friends and the waiter brings over the dessert menu. Everyone else decides not to order anything, so you pass, too, even though you were dying for a piece of chocolate mousse cake.

All three of these pathways are based on the idea that loved ones share social norms, the implicit cultural beliefs that make some things okay, others not.

To test which if any of these pathways affect weight, the researchers recruited 112 women between the ages of 18 and 45 years; half of them were overweight or obese. The researchers then contacted male and female friends, spouses, family members, and coworkers of these women, and ended up with 812 pairs. All of the people were asked about their weight and their feelings about and perceptions of body weight.

The results confirmed the 2007 study’s conclusion that if you have heavier friends, family members, and colleagues, it is more likely that you will be heavier, too. The stronger the relationship between the two people, the stronger the link between their weights. But only one of the pathways—number three—explained why people of the same size clustered together. The study was published in the American Journal of Public Health on May 9, 2011.

“I was surprised,” Dr. Brewis Slade told me during a phone interview. “I would have thought that pathway number two was the most powerful, since it’s really about your struggle to meet other people’s expectations, but it turns out it’s not the best explanation. The key message is that behavior and what people do together is important. So parents might want to go bicycling with their kids, go to a salad bar with kids, focus on what they do together.”

source

There are, of course, many reasons why people gain weight, and the Arizona State study provides only one possibility. But it also provides another motivation for each of us to make healthy choices—they help not only our own waistlines, but those of our friends and family, too.

Source

Why Your Friends Can Be Bad For Your Weight

Being overweight is often viewed as a failure of personal responsibility.

source

“She just hasn’t tried hard enough.”

“He eats too much sugar and he knows it’s bad, but he won’t give it up.”

“Gosh, she’s reeeeally let herself go.”

While personal habits are part of the weight-loss equation, the idea that they’re the only factor is misguided.

“The notion that we are somehow islands when it comes to our weight simply isn’t true,” write Walter Willett and Malissa Wood in Thinfluence: The Powerful and Surprising Effect Friends, Family, Work, and Environment Have on Weight.

As hormonal and other physiological changes in midlife make unwanted pounds easier to put on than take off, it is important to remember that many other factors come into play, including how much money you make, local and national politics, the ubiquity of fast (and often unhealthy) foods, even the design of many homes (think of how many contemporary dining areas are outfitted with, or adjacent to, a television — a distraction that can cause you to unwittingly eat more than you think you have).

“We encounter influences like these and more every day,” the authors write. “They are often so commonplace and subtle, they have become invisible — until they hit our waistlines, that is. These ‘blind spots’ affect our efforts to lose or maintain our weight. And their impact is considerable.”

One of the major factors — and the emphasis of Willett's and Wood’s book — is who you hang out with. Social networks, their research says, play a significant role in weight.

Wood is a clinical cardiologist, staff physician at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and assistant professor of clinical medicine at Harvard Medical School. I talked with her about the power of "thinfluence" and what everyone needs know about maintaining a healthy weight in midlife.

Next Avenue: What is Thinfluence?

Wood: It is very hard to be the one person making a healthy change in a group of heavy people who like to eat and don’t like to exercise. But losing weight is isolating if you don’t engage other people in the process.

source

If you want to lose weight, you need to find people who support that behavior. Most often, the friends you have who are overweight are not going to want to change. If you decide to break the norm, you will be isolated. You need to find even just one person in your circle who wants to do what you’re doing  — or find someone else outside that circle.

What hurdles do people face when they’re looking to surround themselves with more health-motivated friends?

Stigma deeply affects weight loss efforts because people are embarrassed to go out in public. I love when I see a really heavy person racing in an event; it takes a lot of strength to do that. I did a triathlon a few weeks ago and the last finisher was a 350-pound woman. To surround yourself with people so different is hard.

That is the basis of our book: We surround ourselves with people who are like us. So if people want to lose weight, they have to hang out with people different than themselves in order to get to a better place.

Some people say, “Sure, social networks might affect some people, but not me. Obesity just runs in my family.” What do you tell them?

Plenty of people have a family history of obesity and are not obese. The biggest thing is recognizing you have that risk and you have to work harder to avoid the downstream effect.

Epigenetics [the ability to influence gene expression through behavior and lifestyle modification] affects genes and weight. So it’s important to recognize that you’re at risk and change your behavior. You could consult an obesity specialist and say, ‘What are my options?’

What is unique about weight gain and weight loss in midlife?

I’m the perfect person to ask. I’m 51, and once you pass age 40, your body biology changes. And what worked in past — say, skipping a meal or two — doesn’t work. You have to eat regular meals and exercise.

Most people coast through their 40s; I recommend treating the 40s as a bootcamp for midlife. Start minimizing sugars and ramp up exercise because it will be easier when the 50s come. Eat a little less bread and fewer French fries. These small changes can have a huge impact, and a gradual change in your 40s is much easier than making a drastic change when you hit 50.

source

If you find you’ve put on pounds in midlife, you need to be more aggressive about exercise. Look at each day and say, ‘Where do I have fifteen or twenty minutes today to fit in exercise?’

What you do ninety percent of the time affects your health; what you do ten percent of the time doesn’t. If you have a business dinner, you may think, ‘All bets are off.' No. Those things matter. If you stick with it most of the time, you will see the benefits, and those small changes will have a long lasting effect.

How can people find new social networks that support weight loss?

Whatever poor choices you make, you will gravitate toward people who make those same bad choices. But all it takes to change is one person. You just have to find one person.

Look at your friends: If they support better health, stick with them. If they’re keeping you from achieving better health or encouraging you to make choices that don’t support your health, then find new groups. Go to a race, bump into someone from your past, go walk the track in the morning.

You don’t have to abandon friends and family; you just need to have more support during change so you can achieve success.

Here’s an example: I went to do a race, but I hadn’t been exercising a lot before then. I bumped into a friend I hadn’t seen in 30 years. She hadn’t been exercising regularly much either. So we were like, ‘Let’s eat healthier and exercise together.’ It’s important to realize that people who will support you are out there; you just need to find them.

What one thing would you want everyone to walk away from this interview knowing?

It is never too late to change. One little step at time makes a huge difference, and within a year you can make substantial changes.

Source

Are Your Friends a Fat Influence?

Research shows that your ability to lose weight now 

hinges on who you hang out with

Chances are, you've dined with a friend and had a scenario like this unfold: You start salivating over the idea of ordering linguine carbonara, but tell yourself, Oh, I really shouldn't. Then your friend requests that very dish before snapping the menu shut and handing it to the waiter. "Make it two," you say. And there goes your diet.

Friends' health decisions have a funny way of rubbing off on us. So important is their power that the World Health Organization lists them as a determinant of health, as big a factor as genetics and income level. In fact, understanding how pals shape one another's health behavior has top billing in Healthy People 2010, the government's plan for improving national well-being.

Research has found that smoking, deciding to get the flu shot, and taking vitamins are all socially contagious behaviors. But where our friends have perhaps the most influence is on how much we eat, drink, and exercise.

The (Fudge) Ripple Effect
Having a buddy who packs on pounds makes you 57 percent more likely to do so yourself, according to the key findings of James Fowler, Ph.D., a professor at the University of California at San Diego, and Nicholas Christakis, M.D., Ph.D., a sociology professor at Harvard, who have studied social networks for 10 years. "Consciously or unconsciously, people look to others when deciding what and how much to eat, and how much weight is too much," says Fowler.

So while you weren't planning to even glance at the dessert menu, you might change your mind when everyone else orders brownie sundaes. In some cases, we may even seek out relationships that allow us to indulge, says Susan Bowerman, R.D., of UCLA's Center for Human Nutrition. "Many women have 'food friends' they can call up to say, 'I had a lousy day and some fried mozzarella sticks sure would make me feel better.'"

Your social circle influences your drinking habits too. Alcohol is a notorious diet buster (if you can resist a nacho after a margarita, bless you), and according to University of Pennsylvania researchers, drinking is among the "risk behaviors" that they found study participants were twice as likely to engage in if their friends did.

source

Part of the reason we're so easily swayed may be hardwired. Gregory Berns, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of psychiatry and economics at Emory University, found that when others influence us, the area of our brain that makes conscious decisions is not activated. Instead, the occipital lobe, where vision originates, lights up. Translation: We focus on what we see other people doing (like biting into a cupcake), not what we know is right for ourselves (biting into an apple).

Unhealthy Competition
Copycatting isn't always bad for your waistline. Research has found that you are just as likely to pick up good habits from pals. If everyone is ordering salad, do you want to be the one to splurge on a burger and fries? Same goes for booze. "We want to behave appropriately, to make a good impression on others," says Patricia Pliner, Ph.D., professor at the University of Toronto at Mississauga.

Sounds admirable, right? Well, there's often a subtext in these civilized dinner scenes. When two girlfriends are competitive with each other—over guys, work, grades—it can manifest at the table. Undereating is a form of one-upmanship. In her study, Pliner found that when women competed against each other in a variety of skills, those who thought they were losing chose lighter entrees than their rivals at lunchtime. "It was their way of winning," Pliner says. In another study, researchers found that even after being literally starved for more than 24 hours, women would consume only as much food (in some cases, as little as 300 calories) as their companions did.

Things can get especially ugly when friends try to sabotage each other—for instance, pressuring a dieting pal to go ahead and order those french fries or skip the gym. "We don't want to be reminded of our own struggles with weight by watching a healthy eater make careful choices," Bowerman says. "We want her to join our club."

source

Set Your Own Agenda
Hanging with a calorie-conscious crew may keep you on the slim side, but what happens when you join a new club, move to a new town, or start a new job and begin socializing with a new group—one that eats fruit only if it's in a pie? Hint: You'll need to buy some new jeans. That's why it's important to get into the habit of making your own decisions about food. "Being aware of how others influence us is an important first step," says Brent McFerran, Ph.D., an assistant professor of marketing at the University of British Columbia. "If you recognize where you're likely to follow the crowd, you can correct your course." He recommends pre-committing to your meal when you can: Bring your lunch to work, or if you're eating out, be the one who orders first. You'll find that a little independence will keep you healthier and happier in the long run. 

Source