Posted by: Curt | Under: 40's/fit, 50's/fit, Children/fit, Diet and Weight Loss, General Fitness, Ladies/fit, Prime/fit, Seniors/fit, Youth/fit | (0) Comments
The New England Journal of Medicine has published a study that shows just how important social connections are in the obesity epidemic. It is a little dry, but lots of good info. Basically, they have shown that eating and weight gain are tied to our family and friends. So if your family and friends are overweight, you are very likely to be overweight too. This shouldn’t surprise us since the same type of behavior is seen with smoking, drug use and a lot of other destructive tendencies. World of Psychology has a good synopsis of the study and its implications.
While of course you can’t blame your friends for being overweight or grappling with eating issues, it does seem that there is a friendship- and close relationship influence that should be taken into account when trying to lose weight. The researchers attribute this finding to a social contagion — that seeing others overweight makes it seem more okay. This makes sense and has a rich history of peer-influence research to back it up.
…Is this result really surprising? People smoked because other people smoked and made it seem both cool and acceptable. People do drugs for much the same reason. People get up and dance when they see others get up and dance. And I’ve never been to a dinner with friends where if one couple was having dessert, the rest didn’t follow with their own dessert orders.
So you can see that as I have been saying for a while now, abnormal has become normal for most people in America. When everyone is overweight, there is no real social pressure to lose weight- or not gain it in the first place. Add to that tendency to live in denial over the health consequences, and you can see the problem we have facing us.
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