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 Both the number and the type of friends was important, said Luis A.
Nunes Amaral, senior author of the analysis of the online community
of Calorie King, a paid online weight loss program with social
networking features.
“What we found out is the more embedded in the network you are, the
more success you have,” Amaral told Reuters Health. “The fact that
you have lots of friends that also have lots of friends, that’s how
enmeshed into the network you are,” he said. “Having many friends
who only have one friend would not be the same.”
The researchers examined data on more than 47,000 unique visitors to
the online program in 2009 and 2010. Users self-reported their
weights, but Amaral and other experts agreed that in these types of
online programs, people are generally truthful in that respect.
Participants averaged 43 years old and more than 80 percent were
female.
Only 22,400 people visited the program for a second weigh-in after
signing up, meaning that 40 percent of people never returned. Of
those who returned, 5,400 remained engaged for at least six months.
About 2,000 connected with at least one “friend” in the social
network, which left only a small fraction of the original group for
the researchers to investigate.
Most of those who did establish friendships clustered in a giant
group, while the remaining quarter formed small clusters of two to
four people who were not linked to the main group.
Starting out with a higher weight, adhering to self-monitoring
diaries and participating in social networking were all associated
with greater weight loss.
At the six-month point, members who were not social networking had
lost an average of 4.1 percent of their body weight. Those with two
to nine friends lost an average of 5.2 percent, those in the giant
cluster lost 6.8 percent and those with the most exchanges of online
communication lost more than eight percent of their body weight,
according to the results in the Journal of the Royal Society
Interface.
“People write posts and send messages, the system records them but
we didn’t have access so we cannot know for sure what they said,”
Amaral said. “It is known that in face to face interactions what
happens is that people have support, they share experiences. We
believe that the same thing is likely at play here.”
These results should be very encouraging for people who want to try
these kinds of programs, he said.
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“People worry a lot about what happens online, about people who are
mean and negative and so-called ‘trolls’,” he said. Users have to
pay to enter this particular online community, and once they are in
they do all have the same goal, so people tend to cooperate, he
said.
Membership in the Calorie King program currently costs $12 per month
or $49 per year.
Offline programs with a social element, like Weight Watchers, may be
hard to attend for people with kids or complex responsibilities,
Amaral said.
Other studies have found that social support on- and offline helps
buoy weight loss success, said Rebecca A. Krukowski, of the
University of Tennessee Health Sciences Center in Memphis. She was
not part of the new study, but noted previous research in which
people in group-based weight loss programs had more success,
regardless of their initial preference for a group or individual
program.
Social support online typically isn’t as strong as in person, she
told Reuters Health.
Social support and commitment to self-tracking, by recording your
weight, food and exercise, are key to successful weight loss, said
Sandra L. Saperstein, a lecturer at the University of Maryland in
Baltimore.
But it’s hard to know if inducing friendships and support is even
possible, and if so, if it would increase weight loss, said Jean
Harvey-Berino, at the University of Vermont in Burlington.
“This idea is that if you could just get people to act like Facebook
in an online weight loss program it would be golden,” Harvey-Berino
said. People who became most socially embedded in the current study
may have been more “ready” to lose weight, or more committed to the
program, she said.
It’s unclear if forcing less social people to make more connections
would increase their readiness to lose weight.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1DgBJaE Journal of the Royal Society
Interface, online January 28, 2015.
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