Exercising with a friend can boost your drive

More than two years ago, the Oakville, Ont. resident decided to get moving.
"I wanted to get into some sort of shape," said Roach. "I'd gone for a physical and my doctor told me I needed to stop gaining weight. The most exercise I was getting at that point was walking around a mall."
Running seemed to be the easiest way to get a good cardiovascular workout and so she opened her front door and headed out.
Her enthusiasm soon evaporated.
"If it was raining or cold or I didn't feel like it, I wouldn't go. As a result, I wasn't getting better."
But rather than give up, Roach called her friend Marian McCabe and together they joined a running group. The friends continue to run three times a week to this day and have added a core conditioning class to their exercise regimen.

There is a growing body of research illustrating the importance of social networks in affecting eating and physical behaviours, says Diane Finegood, professor of kinesiology at Simon Fraser University in B.C.
"Perhaps the best work on the topic is a longitudinal study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2007 that found that behaviours relevant to obesity can be influenced by friends."
"It's not a completely new idea. There has been different work around the social facilitation of eating, so that when you eat with friends it affects what you eat. The obesity work speaks to the outcome, not the behaviours. But logically, it's the behaviours that ultimately determine energy balance and energy balance ultimately determines weight, and so there must be some impact.
"But a whole host of things in our environment affect energy balance: media, the neighbourhoods we live in, advertising, how much we commute. That is the backdrop. So if we exercise with a friend is that a good thing? My answer is, for some people it probably is, for others it isn't."
McCabe said exercising with her friend makes her accountable and serves as motivation.
"I find exercising with a friend really motivates me," she said. "On those nights when my energy is low, I know left to my own devices I'd probably miss a run. But because I know Denise will be there, I go anyway and I'm always happy I do. I feel great after a workout. In a way, exercising with a friend builds in a layer of accountability because you don't want to let the other person down."
But other people are more successful exercising on their own. When she was in her 40s, Finegood weighed 250 pounds and made the decision to live a more healthy lifestyle - but she did it without involving anyone else.
She lost 70 pounds and has kept it off.
"I don't like exercising with others because I need to set my pace and behaviour for myself and not to measure against what other people are doing. The fear of being engaged with somebody else in that exercise, and how I will feel because I compare myself to them, has too negative a connotation for me. So I don't want to go there.
"I think the take-home message here is that for some people exercising with a friend is a great thing, for others it's not. The challenge lies in figuring out how to help people have healthy behaviours."
Simon Fraser University professor Diane Finegood suggest these strategies to build exercise into a healthy lifestyle.
* Think about developing a healthier lifestyle by shrinking the challenge into small behaviour changes. The prevalent message about losing weight is driven by the weight loss industry: just follow their plan and you will have success. That's the wrong message because it leads to failure. Understand specifically what is influencing you the most and work on that piece of the problem. * Start the journey of becoming more active by determining how active you are now. If you are not at all physically active, start using a pedometer. It will track how many steps you take in a day.
* Set a reasonable, small, sustainable goal as a starting point. Finegood went from taking 3,000 to 4,000 steps a day to 10,000 to 12,500. As she added more steps, she developed new strategies. She suggests taking the stairs instead of the escalator; parking the car further to help you hit your goal; once you've done that, expand the goal.