do you think the size of your friends influences your weight?

does having fatter friends make you feel more OK about being fat?  does having skinny friends make you feel fat even when you're not? 

i managed to pack on 10 pounds in a year while thinking i was losing weight.  why?  my friends in grad school are chubby; my friends in undergrad were skinny and fit. 

what about you guys?  has the weight of the people you hang around with affected your weight, or your perceptions of your weight? 

Yes.  Unfortunately.

I am getting over that though.  Maybe thats why I lost 6 lbs.  I need to ignore any outside influences.  Good or bad.  I need to do what's right for me and my health.

I think it makes you feel more comfortable. I just know when I would mention diet stuff or whatever my friends wouldn't want to hear it. :P Then again they saw me at my worst during my past ED days..so that could play part in it. :/

I think relationships make it easier to pack on weight more so then friendship. At the beginning you want to look your absolute best, but once you know you and your partner are settled you tend to get more *comfortable* and therefore seem to not care as much until you pack on about 20 pounds and find your pants are getting or are tight. :P

i dont think it does... i used to have a group friends i was always going out with, and they were TINY and i was about the same i am now. when i managed to loose some weight a few years ago i had both heavy, and skinny friends. and now im pretty heavy trying to loose weight and my best friend, also my boyfriend, is very thin and athletic... so i dont think the size of friends play into it.

for sure!  :D

the bigger your friends are, the smaller you feel.  how sad...

I think it does. If you're hanging around people who aren't concerned with their own wieght and are CONSTANTLY gaining it's gonna rub off on you.

My two year 60lb weight gain was due to a few factors (stress from my father passing away included) and hanging out with a girl who would frequently order 2 desserts for herself after eating a full meal didn't help. In fact I remember when we first became friends being SHOCKED at how much she ate. I personally thought it was humiliating ordering 4 desserts for a table of 3...

I believe having STOPPED being friends with her as of July 1 is directly correlated with losing 40lbs so far...

God ya, most of my friends are really skinny, not just slim, but thin, model type figurs, and man the amount if times I end up depressed in the bathroom on a night out is countless.

Having skinny friends (which, ALL of mine are) makes me feel pretty crappy. Especially since I'm not really close to any of my female friends. Friends is just a lose term I apply. And I always feel competitive with women because I just don't understand them and I feel like they're always stabbing you in the back anyway. =/

So it just makes me feel like the odd one out not to be skinny and wearing cute clothes.

Plus, I'm pretty tall, 5'7". With high heels I'm usually 5'10". So I tower over them.

But luckily now that I've lost some weight I can wear some cuter clothes and I'm going to see what they think at a party Friday night. =) I'm excited, but it's still going to nothing about the fact that I'll tower over them awkwardly with my geeky guy talk. =/ Oh well.

I think it does. When I was really overweight, all of my close female friends were as well...the ones I actually hung out w a lot (I don't have too many female friends). And then when I started losing, I noticed that some of those girls were not as nice to me, and got mad at me a lot. I've since dropped those friends, and I feel good, I've lost more weight...granted, I haven't run out to go find 'skinny' friends, but I think there are a lot of factors to having friends that are around the same size. Women are weird creatures, we get jealous easy, and I think it's hard when there is a big diff in size.

O, and tin...I have had some 'friends' that are shorter as well (I'm 5'7 1/2ish), and I hate being bigger AND taller....feel like an ogre. I WILL NOT date guys shorter than me, cuz I cant get over that feeling!

absolutely!!! and because they are fatter than you they think your not( i am 50 lbs overweight)in their eyes I'm thin.i hate that!and my  skinny friends think I'm obese and its OK because i am,but not for long...

Absolutely! The same thing happened to me - about a year ago, I moved across the country and changed jobs.  My friends back home, including those I worked with and saw at the gym every day were all slim and petite... I (still) am the smallest of everyone here at my new job... and I have found myself looking in the mirror and thinking "not bad!"... while I was GAINING weight.  I shocked myself just this morning when I got on the scale and realized I have gained 10 lbs in the past year!  Needless to say, it was egg whites for breakfast and soup for lunch today!

Not for me. Skinny and fat are relative to my own ideas of skinny and fat for my body, not the shapes of people around me. I don't think I've ever thought about my weight in relation to people around me - I feel like I would be categorizing my friends into fat friends and skinny friends - no thanks.

well i have to say a lot of my overweight friends' activities revolve around food which is hard to come up with plans... like they always suggest lunch or dinner while i am suggesting coffee or a movie.. seems like i am always struggling w/ that!

I'd say definitely for me. If i'm around people that are bigger than me, it makes me feel better about myself. (Horrible I know) But when I'm around thinner people I am ALWAYS self conscious and feel that I should be dieting. Also, the people around me determine my social.. ness. I become very introverted when I'm around people that are thinner... I'm trying to get rid of this because it's horrible and it's really having an impact on my life.

The worst EVER is having skinny friends who don't work at it.  You see them in their size 4s eating nachos and fries and drinking beer.

Then you end up feeling fat (bc you're bigger than them) and BEING fat, since you're going out to eat and hanging out with them.. feeling silly eating healthy since they can obviously get away with it...

Good post, very interesting.

Original Post by dls337:

The worst EVER is having skinny friends who don't work at it.  You see them in their size 4s eating nachos and fries and drinking beer.

Then you end up feeling fat (bc you're bigger than them) and BEING fat, since you're going out to eat and hanging out with them.. feeling silly eating healthy since they can obviously get away with it...

Good post, very interesting.

 Yeah, I agree. You have to be careful going out with friends that don't have to watch what they eat. If you aren't careful, you'll end up with their eating habits, but NOT their body!

Oh yes!

I had a friend who was morbidly obese, so i felt so very skinny with my 10 excess kilos!

When we stopped being friends i realised I had ballooned and lost it as fast as i could.

The only skinny friends I have hit the gym 4 times a week, so that's perfectly reasonable. One day, I will pull myself together and go with them.

I have friends of all sizes, and the only time it's become sort of an issue is if I'm around a friend, who..whatever their size, is trying to peer pressure me into eating a whole pie or something, haha.

I guess it doesn't sound fun to say you're dieting, so friends will sometimes kind of say oh, come on..you don't need to worry..eat this log of cookie dough with me!

But I really try to resist, and to just say no.

I feel that the people surrounding DEFINITELY affect weight loss/gain. I was around 148 when I started at my last job, then 7 months later I was 158. I had plumped up 1-2 lbs per month because most everyone else was significantly overweight. They would order Chinese food for lunch every other day, which influenced me to choose that awful crap to eat week after week! I was the smallest one there and got comments about it all the time, while still being slightly overweight.

I tried to start up dieting maybe 3 or 4 times during that period of time, but nothing stuck because of the influence of my coworkers. I just kept thinking, "oh I'm not that bad."

In the mean time, I would feel like a fatty around my friends outside of work because I was the biggest. I think because I spent way more time at chunky work than with fit friends, the dark (and chubby) side was victorious. Now I'm out of that place and on the road to healthy town.

I think this is a yes and no question for me.  When I hang around with those people that can eat and eat (and DO eat and eat) without gaining then it`s harder to watch what I eat.

I`ve been really lucky though recently.  The friend that I hang around with most is really small, but works really hard to stay that way and is an AMAZING support.  We go to the gym together almost every day and she`s so proud of everything I accomplish.  If we get a bunch of friends together for dinner at her place she always makes sure there is lots of healthy options for me and through her I get to see what living a healthy lifestyle at a healthy weight looks like. 

definitely.... my larger friends can make me feel good when they call me 'a stick' (I am so not a stick, but it's all relative!)  On the other hand, I feel much bigger when I'm with my skinny sister and sister-in-law....