New Method Supporting Diet: Main Twitter!

Jakarta, turns out to lose weight is not only about the methods and the commitment of those who wish to do so. It also requires the full support of the environment, including from colleagues in cyberspace.

A new study finds that active on social networking sites like Twitter can help a person lose weight, especially social support for the dieter. This conclusion was obtained after investigators observed 96 participants were overweight and obese for six months. Overall participants reported using mobile communication devices connected to the internet and divided into two groups.
Each gained two siniar (podcast) for 15 minutes per week over a period of three months and two mini siniar for five minutes per week in the same period. Siniar contains information about nutrition, physical exercise and weight targets participants.
However, participants in one group is asked to follow a Twitter account to each other in order to provide mutual social support when making a diet. From there, there were 2630 tweets posted to the participants during the study. 75 percent of them contain information, such as details about the participants who reported the achievement of diet program, the rest is a tweet that contains emotional support to fellow dieters.
"The results showed that those who regularly use Twitter as part of a more proven diet program lose weight," said lead author Brie Turner-McGrievy of departmental behavior, health education and promotion, Arnold School of Public Health, University of South Carolina as quoted by MSN, Wednesday (01/16/2013).
"The traditional methods of diet, social support also may be obtained even if only through weekly group meetings. Though we know are effective, but costly and can create a huge burden for participants. For that provide support through social networking online can be cheap and able to reach out to supporters in large numbers, especially those equally committed to achieving a healthy weight, "he continued.
At the end of the study as a whole both groups of participants reported an average weight loss as much as 2.7 percent in the past six months. But it proved to be more successful Twitter users lose weight, even the researchers concluded out of every 10 tweets that were raised by the participants leads to weight loss as much as 0.5 percent.
Sources: http://health.detik.com/read/2013/01/16/073136/2143307/1410/