Obesity is Contagious!

In a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2007, the findings reported that obesity can spread from person to person, much like a virus. It said that when a person gains weight, friends tend to gain weight too. This study involved over 12,000 people, and it followed them for 32 years. It went on to report that when a friend (not even a close friend) became obese, the person's chances of also becoming obese increased by 57 percent. When a close friend became obese, the probability rose to over 150%!

Okay, before you put on a mask or avoid all your overweight friends, let me say that it is NOT like a virus, a physical germ. It is more like a bonding thing. When our friends change, we want to continue to identify with them, and that seems to mean, be like them. We eat like them, we go to the same restaurants as them - many of those restaurants are likely to be of the fast food variety - and we begin to look like them. In other words, we validate them. Just as we want to be validated by our friends, we do likewise for them. It's a belongingness thing. We want to belong to this friend and to have him or her belong to us, and to do that, we must in some way be like them. To use an old cliché, Birds of a Feather, Flock Together.

I can attest to the contagion of how my friends eat. When I go out to restaurants with a friend, and he or she orders a high-calorie, high-fat, large meal, I sometimes feel emotionally compelled to do the same. It scares me that I am so easily persuaded, but after reading this article, I realized that the act of my friend ordering the meal gave me permission to do the same, maybe even an incentive. I suppose there was a voice in my head that said, "If you order a small meal, will this person feel bad? Will this person feel like I'm making a statement about what he or she ordered? I don't want to be different, so maybe I should order a similar meal." Then my Dad's voice would boom out from the recesses of my brain, "So, Anna, if all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you want to do that too!" Thanks, Dad! No I wouldn't.

The researchers also said that the results may be due to the fact that as the friend gains weight, we no longer see him or her as being obese. The person's size become familiar, acceptable. Once we become comfortable with a new behavior or a new way of thinking or living, we are less apt to resist it. So, if by hanging out with a close friend who is obese you become comfortable with obesity, you are highly likely (more than 150%!) to become obese too. For same sex siblings, the probability of also becoming obese is 50%. To find the article, Google "NY Times Obesity is Contagious."

The good news is that the same effect seemed to occur when a close friend was losing weight. Now, that's a good thing! So, what can you do? Make a pact with your friends to lose weight together. And by the way, I offer group coaching for that very purpose.