Fat friends?

When I saw the headline of this article, I had to check it out. A new study on obesity shows that if a friend or relative gets fat, it's more likely that you will as well. Well, how fun is that. To be fair, the article notes that the study shows that fat people tend to hang with fat people and thin people with thin people, and it also notes that this study could be used to further stigmatize fat people. The supposed causative factor is that socially acceptable norm for size changes when a member of your group gets fat.

The study shows that the closer the relationship, such as husband and wife or sisters, one is more likely to gain weigh when their friend or relation does. This does make some sense to me. It's just old folk wisdom that birds of a feather flock together. Married couples eat the same food and many would have the same effects from it. Sisters and brothers grew up eating the same food and will have some similarities in tastes and preferences. If their social lives interact regularly, they could easily be consuming similar amounts of foods and have a common genetic predisposition to gaining. That makes much more sense to me than thinking hey, my friend is still okay even though she's fat, so I'll get fat too!

What first got me interested in the article though was a conversation I had with my sister decades ago. For most of her life, she was overweight, though nowhere near my extreme. She's always been beautiful, charming and in her school days, that ultimate rarity for a big girl -- popular. Heck, she even dated the high school quarterback. I was the more typical fat girl, shy, smart, bookish. What was notable about the conversation we had so many years ago was one line. She said, "I don't have any fat friends." Now times and bodies have changed, and I know this is no longer true for her or her high school friends whom she regularly sees. I always wondered though if part of her social success came from distancing herself from other fat people and if she was in fact, the token acceptable fat girl.

I've always had friends that ran the gamut from skinny to average to fat. I hated being judged on my size, and it seemed hypocritical of me to do that to other people. In stopping to think about it, I've never known anybody who had a circle of friends who were all fat. I've seen weight used a way to reject people, but never as a condition for acceptance. Is size then really the feather that counts, or is it common interests and dislikes?

This article has me with more questions than answers, but I can't help think that even assuming there is high statistical accuracy their information gathering, their conclusions are seriously flawed.

obesity research, fat acceptance