Are Your Friends Making You Fat Analysis

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In the article “Are your friends making you fat?” by Clive Thompson, published in the New York Times on September 13, 2009, Clive dives into the notion that your friends around you influence your lifestyle choices. Clive goes into detail about a 74-year-old has been planning a reunion for their high school and in every year a single guy has been gaining weight constantly until he was obese. When he turned obese he didn’t show up to the next reunion and they eventually figured out he died. The events stood out for Clive because he saw that the Bellolis were part of the Framingham Heat Study which was trying to find the root of heart disease. This study had found, from many willing participants, that behaviors good or bad were contagious between …show more content…
They spread like a virus in friend groups such as if a friend was obese they seemingly infected the group with obesity. These findings seemingly proved the notion that your friends could be making you fat. These findings were very shocking to me when I initially read the article and made me rethink all of the concepts throughout the article.
The major points that this article brings up are very important points that will hopefully help many problems throughout the world. Clive Thompson bring up many things that are plaguing everyone throughout the world and it is something that must be studied. The influence of peers and the people around us is a huge part of everybody’s life and that it is something that needs to be learned so that the bad influence that are transferred through a group can be avoided, but they also need to study it so that we can use the power of influence through groups of do good things such as vote. The article also goes into depth about the subconscious nature of emotional mirroring which is how when someone wants to be happy they want to have lots of friends. This makes us feel wanted and also makes us feel liked so it brings us more happiness as opposed to having little amounts of friends who don’t invite you to
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One of the major things I did not agree on was that people who are 2 or 3 links away from you in friend’s groups can influence your weight loss of gain. This seems shocking to me because how can someone who you don’t see often or hang out with on a daily basis be someone that influence your daily life choices. This does not seem logical because that would mean every single person in the world would have someone who is obese or overweight influencing their daily habits. It would mean that the obesity rate of the world would rise at a huge amount because as more obese people become present the more connections are made and thus more people are influenced. If this point was true, then I would be influenced by the plethora of people I know who are overweight or obese but I am not. Another fact in the article that stood out to me was that do people deserve credit for doing something not out of their own free will but because they are being influenced by their group of friends. They say that people do not deserve credit which was very shocking to me, just because you are influenced by other people it doesn’t mean that you still did not accomplish what your goal was whether it be to quit smoking or lose weight. This is an absurd point to bring up and is something I strongly disagreed on in the

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