SHEDDING kilos is harder than putting them on, which is why the weight-loss industry is so big. Its latest manifestation is online weight-management sites: social networks for the plump in which participants can set a target weight and monitor their progress towards it.As with other social networks, they can also get help from friends—either real-life ones who sign up to the same site, or else digital ones whom they have befriended on the internet. Those friendships are likely to be important. Other studies of weight-loss programmes have suggested that having the support (or chivvying) of friends helps people stick to their diets and exercise regimes.Those studies, however, have all been done with groups of people who knew each other in the real world. A team of researchers led by Julia Poncela-Casanovas of Northwestern University, in Illinois, decided to check if the same was true of groups in cyberspace. Their results, just published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, suggest that it is.Dr Poncela-Casanovas and her colleagues studied records from 47,026 visitors to an unnamed weight-management website. Such sites, it seems, are much like gyms in the real world, in that 40% of these people—around 19,000—visited once and never came back. Only 22,419 lasted long enough to weigh themselves at least twice. Of these, a mere 5,409 stayed the...
from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1y9iaOt
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