Losing Weight: Working Better Together
Open Access
- Author:
- Servich, Daniel Alexei
- Area of Honors:
- Information Sciences and Technology
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Frank Edward Ritter, Thesis Supervisor
Dr. Steven Raymond Haynes, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- Weight Loss
Team Fitness
Health Behavior Change - Abstract:
- Losing weight is often a difficult task for many individuals. There have been a number of studies and attempts to understand how to improve the chances that people indeed lose weight. When individuals are struggling to lose weight, or they decide to stop trying, what methods might be used to keep them from quitting? This thesis focuses on how team-oriented weight loss, aided by a tracking website, impacted individual’s accomplishments. This thesis analyzes a 12-week lifestyle challenge that monitors users’ weight, exercise minutes, and goal weight to lose over the course of the challenge. A total of 274 participants participated, and 150 of them were found to have lost some weight through the twelfth week. Of those that entered a desired end weight, a significant (r(180) = .56, p < .05) relationship was found between setting a goal weight and achieving that weight loss. When comparing the team sizes with the weight lost by the team, a one-way ANOVA test yielded results that were not significant (P > .05). These results together indicate that, while the participants are split into teams, they are still acting more on their individual motivations.