Researchers in the US say that there is a direct link between a person’s attitude on social media and the likelihood that their dieting efforts will succeed.
The study looked at individuals who had connected their MyFitnessPal – a popular calorie-counting app – and Twitter accounts. Participants’ food diary entries were coupled with their social media posts from the same time period. From this, researchers compared adherence to dietary goals with attitudes expressed in tweets. Overall, the researchers examined more than 2 million tweets and 100,000 plus daily MFP entries from almost 700 individuals.
Professor Munmun De Choudhury, of Georgia Institute of Technology, says that an individual’s dieting success - or failure – can be predicted with an accuracy of 77% based on the sentiment of the words and phrases they use on Twitter,
“We see that those who are more successful at sticking to their daily dieting goals express more positive sentiments and have a greater sense of achievement in their social interactions.
They are focused on the future, generally more social and have larger social networks.”
De Choudhury says that successful dieters tend to be more more socially interactive and focused on sharing topics relating to health and fitness via their social media channels,
“We see that these users are much more likely to share healthy recipes, offer tips on nutrition and exercise, and report on their own progress.
Their larger network of friends and followers, and increased engagement, means that they tend to also have stronger support systems, which positively impacts the likelihood of dieting compliance.”
The tweets of people who are not so successful in sticking to their diet plans, tend to have a negative tone; they also tend to be more fearful in their social media posts. Professor De Choudhury says examples of this include tweets like “I’m pretty sure I’m going to lose my mind” and “Feel rough as old boots this morning – ankle hurts, shin hurts, chest hurts, head hurts.”
Conversely, tweets such as “Win like a six times champion” and “If we never stumble we never fall. If we never fall we never fail, and if we never fail we never grow!” are examples of the upbeat and self-reflective language the research indicates is most common to successful dieters.
Maybe Charlie Sheen was just on a big diet when he was #winning…
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