I’ve been reading an interesting article in the New York Times Magazine this week titled “Are Your Friends Making You Fat?” It’s about a study on social relationships possibly serving as a contagion for various social behaviors such as smoking, drinking, happiness, depression and gaining or losing weight, just to name a few of the behaviors. One would think and assume that immediate friends and family have a direct impact on your behavior as well as you affecting theirs. But according to this study even friends of friends that you may not even know can be affected by your behavior as well.

In my situation, I wonder how my weight loss has affected those around me within the one to three degrees of separation that the study researches. I know that my older brother’s weight loss has had an impact on me as well as my younger brother’s weight problems weighing on me as I’ve seen him suffer some of its consequences over time. But I wonder if my weight loss has caused others to reevaluate their own situation. I can say that in my own work experience, the weight loss has been noticed and greatly admired by all those in my office. But I can’t say that it has exactly spurred those same people into action to want to do the same for themselves, even though they professed to want to do so. That would suggest to me that human will is the sole factor in embarking on such endeavors than simply watching the results of a co-worker’s weight loss in real time as I came into the office every day. I have no idea how their friends have reacted, because they may not have even said anything to them about it, or if they have, I’m sure it was in quick passing.

… co-workers did not seem to transmit happiness to one another, while personal friends did. But co-workers did transmit smoking habits; if a person at a small firm stopped smoking, his or her colleagues had a 34 percent better chance of quitting themselves. The difference is based in the nature of workplace relationships, Fowler contends. Smokers at work tend to cluster together outside the building; if one of them stops smoking, it reduces the conviviality of the experience. (If you’re the last smoker outside on a freezing afternoon, your behavior can seem completely ridiculous even to yourself.) But when it comes to happiness, Fowler said, “people are both cooperative and competitive at work. So when one person gets a raise, it might make him happy, but it’ll make other people jealous.”

I suppose then that if I were to ever fall off the wagon, I should expect larger and larger co-workers since negativity has a far greater effect than those that are positive.

Read the entire article at the New York Times.