This study suggests the importance of having a group of supportive, but insensitive to privacy concerns, friends who will keep sharing their fitness status updates in SAS. Privacy concerns kept some participants from uploading their health status updates to Facebook, which would prevent them from receiving all necessary social support. Interesting enough, some negative effects were also reported.

Participants also mentioned that they wanted to manage their projected image to their friends as somebody healthy.

Participants in these interviews shared their personal health status updates in the pursuit of more emotional support, accountability, motivation, advice, etc.

Other researchers investigated why and how people share health information online, by interviewing those who engage with both online health communities and Facebook. They discovered that people tend to ad- here to their apps, and are aware of others’ privacy concerns because they do not want to spam others’ newsfeed. Some researchers investigated the overall ability of existing social media outlets for health interventions by deploying a Facebook app. These studies have demonstrated the importance of user’s social network during the course of a diet with the ul- timate goal of achieving weight loss. Researchers have conducted various studies to understand why users share their health status updates via social network and how their sharing behavior affects their future usage. It is increasingly common for people to share their health and fitness status updates using Social Awareness Stream (SAS) platforms. It was also found that the usage level during the first week of trial and the number of friends that user has were important factors for her continuous com- mitment to a diet. A study on a diet portal called Total Wellbeing Diet investigated which factors were associated with the user retention on its website. Based on these findings, the research community has also been contributing to a better design of effective tools to help people stick with their diet plans to eventually achieve weight loss. these tend to foster more persistent engagement of users in health forums.

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