Why Your Friends Can Be Bad For Your Weight

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

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“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.

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.

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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.

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Why your friends don't want you to lose weight

Every group of friends needs a 'fat one'. Craig Morris explains how to make sure it isn't you

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The Goonies had Chunk, Take That had Gary Barlow, the college fraternity of Robot House from Futurama had Fat Bot and your mates have, um, you.

Sorry, but it seems to be an unshakeable cliché that every group of friends needs a Fat One; someone to be the lovable, chubby butt of all the pie jokes; to make the other members of the group look and feel slimmer in comparison. So what happens when you decide to lose weight and decide you no longer want to be that person?

The people you work with, live with and socialise with can have a huge impact on your weight loss, because they have the power to inform everything from your diet and fitness regime to your self-esteem. This can be a real positive if they’re cheering you on, but the danger arises when this power is wielded irresponsibly. As Men’s Health Forum editor Martin Tod puts it, “Men are less likely to recognise that they’re overweight than women – and less likely to consider being overweight a risk to their health – so male friends will probably start off less than sympathetic.”

The problem may be that your mates don’t want you to lose weight. This problem tends to manifest itself in one of three ways. The first, and easiest to recognise, is bullying. Because social occasions for groups of male friends tend to revolve around food and alcohol, a positive change in behaviour for one member of the group can serve to highlight the extravagant behaviour of the rest. As Martin Tod says, “Sometimes it's easier to make a joke about someone who's trying to lose weight than to confront that you might need to do it yourself.”

It’s all too easy to chalk this stuff up as friendly banter, but as Tod warns, banter can be harmful and counterproductive. When your mates are mocking you for ordering salad at the steakhouse or struggling to do your first sit-up, they’re bullying you every bit as much as when they used to get you to perform the Truffle Shuffle back in school. As Tod advises, this behaviour stems from a psychology of hierarchy that exists in male peer groups. If the alpha male types become threatened it’s natural to respond to a threat with increased aggression; albeit that tends to be passive aggression rather than pinning you down and scenting you with their urine (if that happens, you definitely need new mates).

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The second, slightly less obvious way in which your mates can ruin your diet is misplaced advocacy. This is where your friends, seemingly with their hearts in the right place, belittle your lifestyle choices by insisting that having dessert “won’t kill you”, or telling you with cast-iron certainty that you need to do P90X or you don’t stand a chance.

Registered Dietician Aisling Pigott of the British Dietetic Association explains that in this behaviour stems from social politeness, “It’s the desire to ensure our mates don’t go without,” she says. “It’s the reason we continue to offer that extra lager or bag of chips, even if they are aware that the person is trying to lose weight.”

From Tod’s perspective, the problem is that men tend to prefer to be more proactive than reactive; we prefer to weigh in with our own opinions and be problem-solvers, rather than be supportive good listeners. All well and good when we have expert knowledge of a given subject, but we’re all too happy to blag it when we don’t know what we’re talking about.

The third, manifestation of your mates not supporting you is pure-and-simple apathy. It’s unlikely that your social circle will consciously aim to sabotage your efforts (see the note about urine above if so), but the bottom line is that people don’t like change and will usually do anything to maintain the status quo, so if you find that your mates are ribbing you for the “rabbit food” on your plate, or for cutting down on the lager and pub snacks, or for the way you look in your sweatpants, it’s important that you understand their motives. Once you realise that this behaviour says more about them than it does you, you’ll be able to look at ways to combat it.

So, once you understand the negative effect your friends are having on your weight loss, what can you do about it?

Solution: Cut negative people out of your life

Let’s start with the bullies. The extreme solution would be to cut these people out of your life. It’s like your mum always said, if they were your real friends they would understand and support you. Assuming they have some redeeming characteristics, the answer here would be to accept that support isn’t their strong suit and simply put the worst offenders on the back burner for a while, until your diet is more firmly on course. If you can’t cut them out, dilute them – think of the positive people in your life and drop them a text about a game of squash.

Solution: Understand where they’re coming from

The key to this, as with all bullying, is to recognise that it’s all about self-esteem. When your mates are belting out “Who Ate All the Pies?” the object is not to make you feel bad, but to make themselves feel good. We each carry our own personal feelings of inadequacy and the secret is that we’re all pretty much as crazy as each other and they’ll have their own concerns they don’t want highlighting. When you start to lose weight the bully now begins to fear that the focus will turn to his baldness, shortness, and/or inability to pronounce the letter ‘R’.

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Solution: Watch your language

Start talking about your weight loss efforts in a different way. Martin Tod suggests that some of the negative associations men hold with dieting might simply be about the terms we use. “You’re probably more likely to have the piss taken out of you if you say you’re dieting than if you say you’re getting fit. Men aren’t too keen on the ‘D’ word” - perhaps because products like Diet Coke are marketed so squarely at women, making a diet a somewhat emasculating prospect for a bloke.”

Instead, focus on your exercise regime and how much stronger and fitter you’re getting. Focus on the foods that are enabling you to smash through your personal bests. You’re beefing up on protein to increase your lean muscle mass and you’re balancing all the cardio by massively increasing your nutrient intake with vitamin-rich foods. Throw in some impressive-sounding terms and a statistic or two and they’ll be hooked.

Solution: Get honest and explain why you need this to work

Guys who have a healthy relationship with food never understand the rest of us who don’t. The men who claim they can “eat anything and never put on any weight” don’t have some kind of superhuman metabolism; they just don’t know what it means to truly overeat; habitually, without heed. Explain how you feel about it. Tell your mates that you can’t give yourself an inch without taking a mile; that allowing yourself to let the diet slip for a day can set you down a slippery slope. If you decide that placating them is the easier option all round, plan ahead so you can fit the odd treat into your lifestyle without blowing the whole thing and jumping crazed into a Scrooge McDuck-style vault full of chocolate coins.

Solution: Involve your friends in your weight loss

This brings us to the final tactic you can employ to get all of your friends onside, no matter which category they fall into, and that’s getting them involved. Martin Tod says, “Your mates can be a great support - particularly if they decide to join you in tackling their weight and improving their fitness as well.” This could be something as simple as getting them competitive and organising a kick-about before the pub, or it could be something monumental, like training together for an actual marathon and raising a few sovs for a charity close to your hearts.

Aisling Pigott explains that you might also want to find a new HQ. With 1g of alcohol containing almost as many calories as 1g of fat, alcohol is a diet-killer for many reasons. “Despite being very energy dense, alcohol stimulates most peoples’ appetites, leading to feelings of hunger. And because alcohol lowers our inhibitions, this in combination with stimulating appetite often leads to a trip down to the kebab shop.”

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