For several years, researchers have been sounding the alarm about how weight gain might be “contagious.” Not literally of course, but socially. People who work or hang out with other people that are either overweight or are gaining, tend to gain weight as well. Now, new research by a team of psychiatrists from Miriam Hospital’s Weight Control and Diabetes Research Center and The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University have found evidence that suggests the opposite might be true as well. People who are around others who are losing weight, tend to lose weight themselves. The team has published the results of their findings in the medical journal Obesity.
This new research is based on evidence from the 2009 Shape Up Rhode Island (SURI) campaign team-based weight loss program that the researchers were granted access to. In the campaign 3,330 participants had their weight monitored and were encouraged to compete with one another to lose weight.
In the study environment, team-based weight loss groups were combined with individuals trying to lose weight at the same time, providing the researchers with a perfect control group. After monitoring actual weight lost by both groups over the 12 weeks that the program ran, it became clear that those involved in the team-based approach were doing much better than those that chose to go it alone. This, the researchers say, shows that people respond to one another, by mimicking what the others in the group are doing. If one person loses weight, the find they will as well if they do the same. And so it goes with all of the members of the group copying one another with the result being that they all wound up losing weight.
The researchers also found that weight loss by individuals depended very heavily on which group they were in. Some groups didn’t work very hard, and thus didn’t lose much weight, whereas individuals in groups that did work hard wound up losing a lot.
In interviews with some of the people who lost a significant amount of weight while in the campaign, the majority spoke about how being part of team made it much easier to lose weight, though there were various reasons given. Some said they would be embarrassed to let their teammates down, other’s said the encouragement of their teammates helped them stay focused, while others attributed their success to the focus the team had on weight loss overall which helped them stay focused on their goals as well.
Regardless of reason, the research team says that the results show that when overweight or obese people are among a crowd of others who are having success at losing weight, their chances of succeeding go up dramatically.