If you’ve ever been on a diet, chances are you can agree that there is nothing more gratifying than hearing compliments about your efforts. But did you ever think that such motivational statements could also help you lose weight? Researchers at the University of South Carolina have found a link between Twitter and weight loss.
According to a new study published in the journal Translational Behavioral Medicine, the more motivational tweets people read about diet and exercise, the higher their likelihood of losing unwanted body weight.
In the networked reality of 2012, Rob Ford and many others like him are doing something different: They’re posting the results of their diets online, on their Twitter feeds and their Facebook statuses, and in Mayor Ford’s case, on a website,
The phenomenon is an exciting one for health professionals, since it taps into a new and possibly more cost-effective way to encourage people to lead healthier lives.
“It’s a new form of social pressure,” says Alex Nason, the director of Telehealth for Johns Hopkins Medicine, who was in Toronto recently for the eighth annual Mobile Healthcare Summit. Nason is particularly intrigued by the potential for devices that post a person’s health information on social networking sites.
Researchers at Arnold School of Public Health found that for every 10 Twitter updates read, their subjects lost an average of 0.5% of their body weight.
Lead researcher Brie Turner-McGrievy said this study is the first to decipher a connection between the social-media website and “behavioural weight loss intervention.”
“The results show that those who regularly used Twitter as part of a mobile weight loss program lost more weight,” she said.
In their analysis, Turner-McGrievy and her team followed 96 overweight men and women, who owned Internet-enabled smartphones, for a period of six months.
To see how both groups reacted to peer-motivation, podcasts were sent to each group by a weight loss counselor about nutrition, exercise and goal setting.
Researchers sent two 15-minute podcasts per week for three months to each respondent, and two shorter podcasts per week in the third to sixth months, which were five minutes each.
One group was also instructed to download Twitter and an app that monitored their diet and physical activity. The participants were expected to share their own posts about healthy eating and diet tips to the other members.
Common posts included: “I went to the gym today. Felt great!” or “I avoided eating a pastry this morning at a breakfast meeting! I did have a skim Mocha without whipped cream… not too bad”.
The group who was most active on Twitter, lost the greatest amount of weight
Both groups experienced a 2.7% reduction in weight, but the group who was most active on Twitter, lost the greatest amount of weight.
In creating their study, Turner-McGrievy said her group intended to stay away from traditional weight loss programs that integrate weekly in person meetings because they found this method to be ineffective, costly and ‘can create a high degree of burden on participants.’
She said Twitter is a successful platform because it encourages people to take a more active role in their nutrition by participating in discussions and researching the nutritional value of specific foods.
“We wanted to find a way to provide the group support we normally deliver during a face-to-face weight loss intervention to the online community,” she said. “Providing group support through online social networks can be a low cost way to reach a large number of people who are interested in achieving a healthy weight.”