...or "With friends like these, who needs cheesecake?"
Posted Oct. 2007; Updated Dec. 2007
An intriguing study came out recently, and it basically says that who you hang out with determines what kind of physical shape you'll be in. In other words, who you befriend determines the size of your rear end.
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READ the explosive Harvard study for yourself It also -- perhaps -- suggests that spending more time with people whose results you want to copy, can improve your situation. I'd wager that applies not just to weight, but any aspect of your life, including love, money, social sophistication, you name it.
Is this possible? Is it really a cause and effect relationship, or is it merely a case of "birds of a feather flock together?" After perusing the study and the predictable tsunami of news reports covering it, and after reviewing my own memory tapes of personal observation over the years, I'm inclined to say it's both.
Actually, the study's overall finding seemed like a no-brainer: People, in general, like to associate with people who remind them of, and therefore reinforce their own image of, themselves. Similar socio-economic backgrounds, similar racial or ethnic backgrounds, etc. That's not the case all the time of course, but work with me for a minute and acknowledge that it's the general rule. And so, hot babes cluster together at the nightclub; not-so-hots cluster together with their kind. Players roll with their crew of acolytes who may hold slightly lower status, but they can't be too far down. At the health club, the "gym queens" (as one skinny friend refers to my preening ilk) congregate and train with one another, not with obese or underweight members, at least not socially.
Monkey See...
It plays into a sociological phenomenon called "social proofing." I'll spare you the graduate level thesis version and give you the Cliffs Notes version instead: Social proofing is simply the process by which we humans look to those immediately around us to figure out the appropriate behavior.
Social proofing can have "positive" or "negative" outcomes, some of which are pretty non-controversial, i.e. telling schoolchildren to avoid drugs. A negative social proofing example would be the "stop snitchin'" culture that is feeding genocidal death and imprisonment rates of African American males.
Other outcomes can be quite subjective and ambiguous, like joining the military - did a recruit do it for love of his or her country, or because he or she was mentally manipulated by images of adventure or the stirring words of silver-tongued politicians? It all depends on one's point of view. But the bottom line is always, "if so many other people are doing it, it must be OK."
It's how armies are able to convince thousands of otherwise rational men to march off to their deaths. It's how millions of Americans have come to believe that it's correct to spend most of their waking hours away from their families, so that they can make money in order to exist and to keep the economy moving through their labor. And on a much smaller scale, it's how we allow our friends to set the tone for what constitutes a proper lifestyle. Our friends tell us, through nonverbal cues, what is acceptable, what is tolerable and what is desirable.
So if a friend "says" it's OK to be 50 pounds overweight by the act of being fat, our subconscious tells us it's OK for us, too. At least that's what the study is suggesting. Perhaps most surprisingly, friends who were separated by hundreds of miles of distance were still likely to weigh similar amounts. Fat friends were fat on both ends of the long-distance phone line. Skinny individuals tended to have a skinny friend at the other end.
A dash of lemming
So what does this tell us? Well, a couple things. One, that most people are followers. They follow the crowd, they follow the herd. Back in pre-historic times this was a good thing, because the herd had a collective, instinctive knowledge of where threats, such as predators, were coming from.
Second, and somewhat related, is that before you can get out of a chronic, undesirable situation, you have to raise your personal standards. You have to be disgusted with where you are now, and be rapturously in love with reaching the next level. This is often painful, as it can mean leaving behind old friends who are incompatible with your vision of the new you.
To the first point, I've harped on this for a long time, though I'd never dream of taking credit for this truly ancient wisdom: Dare to be different and do different. Instead of going out to happy hour to pump toxins and empty calories into your body, form a social clique at the gym instead. Or make friends while walking in the park. Cut back on or altogether avoid television, which is the medium of misdirection. Doing these things right now may sound inconceivable to a few of you, but you can reach them in time. Think back to when you were a young child - did you ever despair that you'd never be able to learn all the things that adults do, like paying bills, driving cars, counting money and getting proper change? But you learned them, of course. It's all a part of growing; it doesn't happen overnight, but if you honestly commit to it, you will get there, or darn close.
As for the second piece, getting disgusted/falling in love, an assortment of star speakers in the motivational firmament have brought me to that realization. Almost any rapid progress I've made in my life came as a result of personal crisis or near-crisis. I started lifting weights because my self-esteem was in shreds due to bullies and rejection by girls. I bought my first home after wallowing in my mom's house for more than a year and getting fed up with being teased as a "scrub" by my then-girlfriend (LYRICS: "If you're at home, with ya mama, oh yes boy, I'm talkin' to you!" ). Tony Robbins, perhaps the world's premiere self-help guru, was a pathetic, penniless, self-loathing loser (by his description) before he got up the gumption to start tapping into his powerful subconscious and build a motivational empire.
Pattern, interrupted
The key thing with such quantum-leap advances is that the subject (you) must realize that his or her patterns, or everyday repeated behaviors, are yielding unsatisfactory results - your pay, your weight, the quality of your relationships. The only way to change those results is to shake things up, adopt new patterns of behavior. If your family and longtime friends would like to join you on this journey of self-optimization, great. If not, well tell them "I'm sure sorry 'bout that" and do what's in your heart anyway. You should not feel guilty - you have one life, it's yours and you have to make the most out of it, for you. Make the sacrifices you must in order to protect and love your children, but do not let anyone else hold you back.
For more on social proofing, I highly recommend the book Influence, the Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini, Ph.D. My only criticisms of the book are that it sometimes gets larded down in repetitious rehashing of previous points (which is kinda the point of advertising, ironically - break down the subconscious by bombardment); and like many academics, Cialdini likes to wield his obviously formidable intellect like so much brain-bling. But these faults fall away in comparison to the defensive armament he provides to readers - including schlubs like me who'd mindlessly fallen prey to marketers for most of my life.
So how do you put all this high-minded rhetoric into action, so that your friends are making you thin and rich, instead of fat and poor? Fair question.
If you're the analytical type, like me, I suggest you hop on down to Amazon.com, or eBay, or even free ol' Google, and feast your brain on all the material out there on the area you want to improve. Enter terms like "how to become rich" "how to be a millionaire (or billionaire)" "how to attract women (or men)" or whatever. Be creative. Another success tip that's worked since forever, and that I can't steal the credit for: state your question in the form of a positive, net-gain statement. For example, instead of "How to lose weight," ask "How to get a great body." You want to focus on what you want, not what you don't want. I know it sounds like splitting hairs but trust me, the masters of success throughout time confirm this. To paraphrase Mother Teresa, "I'll never participate in an anti-war rally. But if you have a peace rally, let me know." Focus on the vision you want.
Get a Knowledge Upgrade
Once you feel comfortable with your background knowledge, or if you're like some people who learn better by simply jumping right in, join a group of people (i.e., new friends) who do what you'd like to do. They can be a local running club, or a public speaking group like Toastmaster's International, or a local real estate club. If you're on this site, you may be interested in getting really buff, in which case you could see if there's a local bodybuilding or fitness competition club. You may go to check one of these groups out and find that you're the rankest amateur there. That's fine. It's better than fine. The nature of most groups is that they have to continually replenish their membership as people move, quit, break off to form their own clubs, etc. If the place is worth joining, you will be welcomed with open arms, since one of the best ways for members to master a subject is to teach it to new folks.
So yes, your friends can make you fat. They can make you lots of things. The great news is, you do have a choice.
Posted Oct. 2007
