What is your relative weight?

The Dorit Baxter blog comments intelligently on the kerfuffle about a recent study indicating that "weight gain spreads like a plague among clusters of friends":

Summaries of these findings speak of the concept of social contagion in which obesity spreads like a virus through a social network giving a new and literal meaning to the term obesity epidemic. Reports of the study explain the hypothesis that friends affect each others’ perception of fatness so that when a close friend becomes obese, obesity may not look so bad.

We've long known that our self-perceptions can be unreliable, but this raises, for me, a truly fascinating concept, which is that perception itself is relative. Could it be that light waves are processed by cones and rods--and also by society--before they reaches your visual cortex? Amazing.

Comments

[Kathleen]

I think that sub-consciously we must have all known that our perception of our size and that of others is flawed by our own experience. And not just those that suffer from anorexia. After all we women constantly judge ourselves relative to others and who more so than our friends. Don't we all pat ourselves on the back when our friends move up a size and decide that we aren't quite so overweight after all? To face a mirror in a changing room can be daunting when we have settled on a unique perception of our size. Also to borrow a friend's clothes (who theoretically shares our size) can be an upset or pleasant surprise. Then again is the size that we perpetuate to be, sometimes we cling to an illusion that we are a size as it allows us to follow our own dictates. Reality may force us to change our habits or lose our friends, for if birds of a feather stick together then certainly similar-sized women may do the same. Witness the ostracizing of the new slender employee/girlfriend in a social group (at least by the women).