Friendship can help or hinder weight-loss plans

Add your friends to the growing list of things that can help you put on weight.

Or, better yet, lose it.

That’s the hidden message in an intriguing report published in last week’s New England Journal of Medicine that showed a strong link between weight and friendship.

“We think this is the really good news from this study,” says James H. Fowler, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego and co-author of the report. “Not only is obesity contagious, but thinness is also contagious. … These social networks act like multipliers.”

No need to convince Jennifer Heisler, a Lean Plate Club member from Annandale, Va. Heisler and her husband courted over food, eating out at restaurants and cooking meals together. Both gained weight, and both ultimately lost it.

But Heisler put on the most: 25 pounds. “I’ve always been really thin,” says Heisler, 28. “I started gaining weight after I started dating my husband. But he also had a big effect on me being able to lose the weight, because he did it with me.”

She didn’t have to twist his arm either. “He saw it was working for me,” she says, “and that it was not that much effort or that much change in our lives. So he decided to do it with me.”

Just ask Lean Plate Club member Sallyann McCarthy of Frederick, Md. She caught the “healthy change” bug from her sister, who recently underwent surgery and was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. Her sister lost 30 pounds and controlled her diabetes. That motivated McCarthy to address her own weight struggles.

McCarthy then tapped her friend and colleague, Mary Ann Braham, to join her in losing weight. The two met at Frederick Memorial Hospital, where McCarthy is a diabetes nutrition educator and Braham is a chaplain.

The friends stock an office refrigerator with chopped lettuce, vegetables, fruit and other ingredients for healthful lunches and snacks. They trade off preparing salads, soups and other food to eat together. Each has lost about 10 pounds since they started a month ago.

“I’ve done this with Weight Watchers, where you get some support,” McCarthy says. “But it’s not the same as doing this with your friend.”

Braham also has been inspired by hospital colleagues who have lost weight, including one nurse who shed 65 pounds. “If she can lose that much,” Braham says, “I can take off some, too.”

It’s that combination of successful role model and social support that leads some scientists to suggest that “we can harness the same forces to slow the spread of obesity that help cause it,” notes weight loss researcher Janet D. Latner, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. “Helping each other stay on track is the nature of self-help, whether it occurs on the Internet or in actual self-help groups.”

Some experts worry, however, that the latest findings could be used to discriminate against overweight people. “The danger in interpreting these results is to blame obese people for problems that others have,” says Kelly Brownell, director of Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. “That could further stigmatize obese people.”

Pat Clark, a Lean Plate Club member in Elk Grove Village, Ill., with an obese best friend, understands how weight can strain a relationship. Clark, 47, gained 20 pounds while nursing her elderly mother through an extended illness until her death in April. Now she’s trying to lose that weight and doesn’t want her efforts to ruin a valued friendship. “I’m not cutting off contact,” Clark says, “but I do lay out some boundaries.”

So when her friend suggested eating breakfast in a fast-food restaurant before hitting a local flea market, Clark offered a different plan: pack their own breakfasts and eat them together at a park near the flea market before shopping. “That way,” Clark says, “I could control what I was eating and she could eat whatever she wanted.”

Clark understands that her new habits add a different dimension to this important friendship. “I don’t push it on her,” Clark says. “She has to get (to) the point where she is ready.”

Join Sally Squires online from 10 to 11 a.m. Tuesdays at www.leanplateclub.com, where you also can subscribe to the free Lean Plate Club weekly e-mail newsletter.