Weight Loss Can Lead To Friend Loss

The Detroit Free Press reports that the lifestyle change necessary to embark on a fitness or weight loss regimen can be alienating for those closest to you. One woman garnered the ire of her granddaughter when her fitness regimen meant that she stopped having time to drive her to school and the girl was forced to walk the 2.5 miles herself. Another lamented losing a friendship that involved a lot of cooking and eating. Another recalled sensing that her coworkers were jealous of her newfound health and fitness after she changed her lifestyle.

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Meeting a weight loss or fitness goal, especially a significant one, often shifts the dynamics of your interpersonal relationships. Friends say you're different, and that they have to get used to the new you. Your wife is suddenly more affectionate, and you wonder why you waited a decade to drop that beer belly.

A dramatic change in lifestyle will likely impact one's interpersonal relationships; anyone who has attempted to dedicate themselves to anything that takes a large time commitment is going to have to give up something- work, friends, or sleep. When I decided to start training for a marathon last summer, I found myself having to turn down dozens of invitations to parties, and eventually people stopped asking me to hang out on Friday nights.

That being said, spending time around someone who has devoted all of their spare time to losing weight can be intolerable, especially if all they want to talk about is how their pants are totally too big on them now and how awesome their butt looks. In some ways, weight loss can lead to an uptick in self-worth that can lead to some insufferable self-absorption and borderline vanity. If someone's working on a fitness goal- say they're training for a triathlon- they may become similarly absorbed in their goals. I'm only a few weeks in to my push to the October marathon, and I'm already finding myself unable to find anything else to talk about besides running-

"How are you today, Erin?"
"Just fine, except I have a five mile interval workout later, and I'm hoping to run four X:XX mile splits with a 400 meter break between them. I'm nervous because my shin's been bothering me and the last thing I need are shin splints. I started doing these foot exercises again to strengthen this tendon that can cause shin pain if it's too weak, but I'm not sure if it's working. Also I think my left second toenail is going to fall off. I can't get a pedicure for the rest of summer. Ha ha!"
(other person walks away.)

See? Annoying.

I'm fully in support of people taking care of themselves and following their doctor's advice when it comes to what's best for their health, but significant lifestyle changes will obviously cause significant changes in what you have to talk about with other people.

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The Detroit Free Press article suggests readers sit down and talk to loved ones about impending lifestyle changes and how they might effect the relationship, but I think the solution's much simpler than a long, drawn out conversation. Are you going to have less free time? Schedule a date to watch a movie or TV show or talk on the phone once a week. Do you spend time around your friends in cooking/eating situations? Cook/eat healthy food! Are people jealous of your weight loss? Fuck 'em. Who would want to be friends with someone that mentally small that they can't be happy for a healthy lifestyle change?

How about you? Have any of you experienced a change in friendship as a result of you or a friend changing their lifestyle to include more exercise?

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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:

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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.”

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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.

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