Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Building a strong social community for support when using an online weight management program can drastically help a person in their quest for fitness, according to research published Wednesday in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
In the study, researchers from the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and their colleagues found that online dieters with higher levels of “social embeddedness” (meaning that they logged in regularly, recorded their weigh-ins and ‘friended’ other members) lost at least eight percent of their total body weight in just six months.
Conversely, the less users interacted with other members of the community, the less weight that they wound up losing. In all, those who did not connect with others lost about five percent of their body weight over six months, while those with between two and nine friends lost nearly seven percent and those with at least 10 friends lost more than eight percent.
“Our findings suggest that people can do very well at losing weight with minimal professional help when they become centrally connected to others on the same weight loss journey,” study author Bonnie Spring, a professor in preventive medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, explained.
“There is an almost Facebook-like social network system in this program where people can friend each other and build cliques,” added senior author Luís A. Nunes Amaral, a chemical and biological engineering professor at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science. “In this case, we found the larger your clique, the better your outcomes.”
The authors claim that their study is the first to use study an online weight management program to investigate social network variables and discover what aspects of online connectedness most effectively helped promote weight loss among dieters. They used data from the CalorieKing.com online weight-loss community to analyze user data and uncover trends in this network.
The website, which requires members to pay a fee to access weight-loss tools and an online community, did not include the identities of users but did provide the date that they registered, as well as their age, height, gender and initial weight and time-stamped activities within the online community over a nearly one-year period.
The researchers analyzed user engagement, including recorded weigh-ins, friendship requests and online communication They found that the frequency with which members reported their weight was a good indicator of positive outcomes. They also found that those communicating with others were likely to be more engaged and more likely to get support when needed.
“Those who regularly track their progress, known as self-monitoring, lose more weight in clinical studies,” the university said. “This study found that self-monitoring was associated with greater weight loss, too, but Spring was surprised that even greater weight loss was associated with being highly embedded in a network of other people trying to lose weight.”
“In the clinic, we don’t have the ability to connect people with such a large network of others on the same journey to lose weight,” Spring added. “I was very surprised by how lawfully each step-up in social connectedness translated into greater weight loss. We could clearly see the benefit of the online social network for weight-loss success.”
She noted that online weight loss programs appear to be good alternatives for those unable to attend in-person weight-loss therapy due to lacking time or geographical proximity – especially for those who take full advantage of their self-monitoring and social networking features.
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