Facing My Weight Fate

When I heard about the study that says that obesity is contagious, I dropped my burrito and called my friend Jane. “Can you believe this?” I asked. “There’s a new study out that says that bad eating habits can spread from person to person like the flu! What’s worse, they’re more likely to spread among friends, not family members or coworkers.”

“Oh, I believe it,” Jane said, her voice muffled by the crunch-crunch-crunch of pretzels dipped in ranch dressing (her favorite snack). She reminded me of that weekend in upstate New York when we polished off an entire bag of Fritos before dinner. And the time we smeared fancy La Maison du Chocolat candies onto a plate with a knife, then scraped them into our mouths. Or when the steam from our drive-thru kielbasas fogged up the car window and we almost got in an accident.

We laughed and agreed that we are a bad, bad influence on each other. Those occasional crimes of gluttony would never have been perpetrated alone!

But to some people, especially Very Serious Scientists, girlfriends chowing down together is no laughing matter. Nicholas Christakis, MD, of Harvard Medical School, and James Fowler, PhD, of the University of California, San Diego, are authors of that study that grabbed my attention. “The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network Over 32 Years,” published in July’s New England Journal of Medicine, found that your odds of becoming obese went up 57 percent if you had a pal who became obese as well. Among mutual friends, the effect, ahem, ballooned, with chances increasing 171 percent. In other words, bad habits are contagious, even among pals who live thousands of miles away from each other. “It’s not that obese or non-obese people simply find other similar people to hang out with,” Christakis said. “Rather, there is a direct causal relationship.”

To be fair, I haven’t read the whole study and don’t plan to because I get the gist. And I suspect Christakis and Fowler are on to something, namely that your friends influence what you eat more than even parents or spouses. If you want to eat smarter, get thinner, and live longer, avoid friends who consider feed bags to be accessories and cultivate those who put millet at the base of their food pyramid. 

My best pals, who are also friends with each other, can be described as Rubenesque, even if their BMIs don’t quite tip off the bell curve into obesity. There’s Jane, about whose habits I have revealed too much (sorry Miss J), and pleasantly plump Gail, who loves to eat out and often orders so much food that the chef comes out to ask what publication she is reviewing the restaurant for. Finally there’s Marie, an enthusiastic cook who tells her kids at mealtime, “It doesn’t matter if you’re hungry or not, it’s time to eat.” Like me, she was raised a card-carrying member of the Clean Plate Club and has no patience with picky appetites. Some of my happiest moments and more memorable meals have been spent with these women.

I have a wider circle of acquaintances—let’s call them the Skinny Bitches—acquired later in life, mostly while working at women’s magazines. There’s the publisher who has been on diet pills since she was eight, and the editor who weighs herself every morning and won’t leave the house if she doesn’t like the number. There’s the Editor-in-Chief who eats lettuce leaves drizzled with vinegar—just vinegar—for lunch every day. And the novelist who orders a steamed vegetable platter every time we dine together, and if I’m running late, orders me one too, as if doing me a favor. (One simply can’t get thighs like mine on steamed vegetable platters.) Oh and don’t think I’m being disrespectful calling them the B-word. They think that’s a compliment. Skinny Bitch is a best-seller and all my frenemies are reading it.

I am not overweight and I don’t have any health issues related to my occasional lapses in nutritional judgment. But I do come from a family of plus-size personalities, and bad food habits have taken a toll on them. My very fat dad died of heart disease at 50, my uncle has diabetes, and two corpulent aunts have breast cancer. According to the study guys, hanging out with friends who would force-feed me more of those infernal steamed veggies would reduce my odds of meeting a similar fate. So that means if I were to spend more time with the Skinny Bitches, I would probably live longer. It sure would seem longer. Instead I’ll try to be a positive influence on my plump pals, encouraging them to join me on walks or shopping excursions in lieu of food binges. I’ll keep you posted on my success. I predict my unscientific study will prove that healthy habits can be just as contagious as bad ones.