A recent study has suggested that you need to stop hanging out with people who are obese and hang out with people who are healthy if you want to lose weight.

Professor Kylie Ball, from Deakin University in Australia, who led the research team, said these findings suggest that healthy behavior may be contagious.

From in.news.yahoo.com:

The researchers tested the extent to which a fashion for healthy behaviour among a person’s friends and family could influence their own lifestyle.

The women who took part in the study were asked to rate how much they agreed with statements such as “I often see other people walking in my neighbourhood” and “Lots of women I know eat fast food often”.

“The importance of social environmental influences on health-promoting behaviours such as physical activity and healthy eating has been increasingly recognised,” Ball said.

“Ours is one of the first studies to demonstrate the association of both social support and social norms with physical activity and eating behaviours.

“The potential to modify social norms as an intervention lever for promoting increased engagement in physical activity and healthy eating is worthy of further investigation,” she added.

These findings have been published in scientific publisher BioMed Central’s open access International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity.

If you are a member of the young society and strive for nothing but positive changes, this compilation of inspirational quotations will help you make a big difference in no time.

Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon.  A happiness weapon.  A beauty bomb.  And every time a crisis developed, we would launch one.  It would explode high in the air – explode softly – and send thousands, millions, of little parachutes into the air.  Floating down to earth – boxes of Crayolas.  And we wouldn’t go cheap, either – not little boxes of eight.  Boxes of sixty-four, with the sharpener built right in.  With silver and gold and copper, magenta and peach and lime, amber and umber and all the rest.  And people would smile and get a little funny look on their faces and cover the world with imagination.  – Robert Fulghum

When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of hell.  That is why we dread children, even if we love them, they show us the state of our decay.  – Brian Aldiss

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature.  Most persons do not see the sun.  At least they have a very superficial seeing.  The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and heart of the child.  The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.  – Ralph Waldo Emerson