Users of an online weight loss programme lost more when they participated in the social group, compared to more isolated users, a new study finds. Reuters Health reports that according to Luis A Nunes Amaral, senior author of the analysis of the online community of Calorie King, both the number and the type of friends was important. "What we found out is the more embedded in the network you are, the more success you have," Amaral said. "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.
The researchers examined data on more than 47,000 unique visitors to the paid online weight loss programme with social networking features in 2009 and 2010. Users self-reported their weights, but Amaral and other experts agreed that in these types of online programmes, people are generally truthful in that respect.
Participants averaged 43 years old and more than 80% were female. Only 22,400 people visited the programme for a second weigh-in after signing up, meaning that 40% 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% of their body weight. Those with two to nine friends lost an average of 5.2%, those in the giant cluster lost 6.8% and those with the most exchanges of online communication lost more than eight percent of their body weight, according to the results.
"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 programmes, he 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 Centre in Memphis. She was not part of the new study, but noted previous research in which people in group-based weight loss programmes had more success, regardless of their initial preference for a group or individual program.
[link url="http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/06/us-weight-loss-social-networking-idUSKBN0LA2I320150206"]Full Reuters Health report[/link]
[link url="http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/12/104/20140686"]Journal of the Royal Society Interface abstract[/link]