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Social networking linked to success in online weight loss communities

Within an online weight management community, the use of social networking is associated with greater weight loss success, according to recent findings.

“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,” researcher Bonnie Spring, PhD, professor in preventive medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, said in a press release.

In the study, researchers evaluated an online weight management (OWM) program with 22,419 members. The data included participants’ sign-up date, age, height, gender and initial weight. The researchers also had access to time-stamped activities within the online community, including recorded weigh-ins, friendship requests and online communication.

Of the participants, 2,033 established at least one online friendship over the course of the study period.

They found that weight loss was significantly associated with a participant’s original BMI, adherence to self-monitoring, and social networking. Notably, the researchers found that in the model for weight loss, greater levels of embeddedness in the network was the variable with the highest statistical significance. At 6 months, the average weight loss increased from 4.1% for non-networked members to 5.2% for those with two to nine friends, to 6.8% among those connected to the ‘giant component’ or largest fraction of the network and to 8.3% among those with high levels of social embeddedness.

“There is an almost Facebook-like social network system in this program where people can friend each other and build cliques,” Luis A. Nunes Amaral, PhD, professor of chemical and biological engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science and co-director of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems, said. “In this case, we found the larger your clique, the better your outcomes.”

Disclosure: Spring reports support from a National Institutes of Health grant. Please see the full study for a list of all other authors’ relevant financial disclosures.