Contents
Introduction
This book will help you make healthy changes in your life by improving your environment—and in so doing, transforming the world. It is not your classic diet book. It is not an exercise manual. It is unlike any other nutrition and physical activity plan you have ever seen. It is a guide, rooted in exciting new research, on how to make lasting, positive change in your life by creating a supportive social network and a favorable food and physical activity environment.
There is so much misinformation in the media these days, especially when it comes to nutrition and exercise. People are smart and want to make meaningful change in their lives through credible guidance supported by real evidence. This book offers just that—evidence-based counsel brought to life by personal stories of success and proven strategies for achieving your goals.
The first step is to understand the nature of the problem. We’re facing an overwhelming epidemic of poor nutrition, inactivity, and excess body weight in this country. More than two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese. And even for those who aren’t overweight, it’s still difficult to eat as well as one would like and exercise as much as one needs to stave off weight gain.
For decades we’ve been told that our creeping overweight and lack of physical activity is our fault—that we lack self-discipline, that we’re lazy, that we’re self-indulgent. With such an accusatory finger pointed at us, it’s no wonder we despair.
But is our overweight and unhealthy lifestyle really our own fault? Do we simply lack willpower? Are we just lazy overeaters?
I don’t think so.
Take Martha Peterson At the age of 51, Martha’s weight had ballooned to a high of 210 pounds. She was living in Atlanta at the time, a city with serious obstacles to healthy living—among them, roads made for driving, not walking, and a tradition of heavy southern cooking. Many of Martha’s Atlanta friends were also overweight. “I had pretty much given up on exercising,” she says. Then, in 2009, Martha moved to Denver. There she found an environment more conducive to physical activity and good nutrition, as well as a network of friends with an active, healthy lifestyle. A little over a year later, she had lost 53 pounds, was walking regularly with her new friends, joining a neighbor for spinning classes at the local recreation center, and eating better than she ever had.
As Martha’s story suggests, our food intake and physical activity are not matters of simple willpower. New research backs this up. Study after study suggests that the crisis we’re facing as individuals and as a nation is only minimally caused by our own poor choices—it is primarily a reflection of our surroundings, both our social and our physical environments. Complicated forces have converged over the past several decades to create an overall environment toxic to healthy eating and activity. Our family upbringing, the communities in which we live and work, large cultural shifts, economic factors, and local and national policies have all fostered the development of this unhealthy environment. We’re surrounded by unhealthy food—and messages to eat that food—and by barriers that keep us from being physically active. Whether we live on the East or West Coast or somewhere in between, in an urban, suburban, or rural area, we face huge obstacles to healthy living.
In other words, it’s not just you; it’s the company you keep and your surroundings.
Only recently have we become aware of how tight the relationship is between people and their environment. This concept, known as the socioecological model, recognizes that our behavior is shaped to a large extent by forces outside of our control, in our social and physical surroundings. A slew of factors beyond willpower affect our health and health-related behavior, from our genes to our family dynamics, social ties, and the place we live.
Habits are hard to change. But when your environment changes, so do your habits. The point is this: To make healthy living easier, we need to create an environment that supports our health rather than sabotaging it. Fortunately, we now have the tools to do so—key among them, social networks.
When we hear the term “social network” these days, we tend to think of online networks. But social networks are as old as humankind itself. They are defined simply as groups of people and the connections between them. Social networks are complex, powerful entities that shape our thoughts and habits and can function either to our detriment or to our advantage. There is even emerging evidence that behavior within social networks is contagious, spreading from person to person. For years, we’ve known that social networks influence who smokes, who drinks, who contracts sexually transmitted diseases, even people’s happiness. Now we understand that they can also have a profound influence—either positive or negative—on our body weight and physical activity levels.
Consider this: Studies show that people are far more likely to become obese when a close friend becomes obese. This has proven true not just for adults, but also for teenagers. This “peer weight” impact is particularly powerful among women—and also overweight adolescents. Moreover, when you look at weight issues among large groups, even whole nations, the really powerful large-scale impact of social networks emerges: People are most comfortable weighing slightly less than the norm in their social networks. But if that norm creeps upward, they find higher and higher weights perfectly acceptable. In other words, as weights deemed acceptable rise, the new, higher norm spreads from person to person.
On the other hand, social networks can also have a beneficial effect on weight control. One 2008 study showed that if a spouse loses weight, the partner loses weight as well. There’s equally strong evidence that people are more effective at losing weight when they embark on weight loss programs with friends. In one study, people were recruited to participate in a weight loss program—some with friends to support their weight loss efforts and some without such a “friends network”. Those with the friends network (whether they were old friends or newly acquired friends) were much more successful at losing weight and maintaining healthy behaviors over the long term.
Right now it takes a real effort to make healthy choices, even for those of us who are motivated and have a supportive social network. Despite our best efforts, less than a third of American women maintain a healthy body weight. We try to eat well, but the average person gets 35 percent of her calories (750 calories per day) from added sugars and unhealthy saturated fats—that’s 23 teaspoons of added sugars and three and a half tablespoons of solid fat. And we aren’t dishing these teaspoons of sugar out of the sugar bowl or digging into the Crisco can. This sugar and fat is embedded in our food. Our food supply has seen dramatic shifts in the past thirty years or so, with more and more foods available to us that are cheap, convenient, and mostly unhealthy. We have also witnessed dramatic changes in how we eat—we cook less, eat fewer family meals and consume more meals while watching television, working at our desks, or riding in our cars. In addition, we move less throughout the day.
Not all of us can change our lives by moving from one location to another, as Martha did. Nevertheless, we can do a lot to alter our social and physical environments. Restructuring your personal environment takes focus, time, and effort, but it’s well worth it. You’ll see from the strategies offered in this book that just shifting one or two elements in your environment can make a big difference. And seeing how effective these simple changes can be gives you the confidence—and the tools—to make additional, more ambitious changes. One success leads to another. Moreover, when you alter your own surroundings—even if the shift is subtle—it has a ripple effect, changing the lives of those around you, your family, friends, and community.
It’s my belief that creating change on a large scale begins with personal action.
This book grows out of new research conducted with my colleagues at Tufts
