The Fat Girl's Guide to Living

FGG’s very own Toni, far right, admires her new backside

Ahhh, friends. They love us, they tease us, they feed us chocolate cake and help us hide the evidence. The best of those also help us figure ourselves out, encourage and motivate us, and step up to the plate when we need our lazy butts whooped.

I’ve found this is especially true with brand new friends who share a common goal or interest. Sometimes the familiar, comfy feelings in an old friendship make us less likely to push the envelope farther, or old wounds and sensitivities make us less likely to push an issue hard.  When we fall into those cozy patterns with lifelong friends that become hard to break, the fresh, clean, nothing-to-lose slates of new friendships can give us a spark that lights a fire under our butts to get up and moving toward our goals again. Put a group of them together, and you can be strong, steady building blocks to each other’s success.

With most of us using some form of social media venue – Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, even blogs – we’re constantly meeting new people and forging new friendships. These communities are a great place to tap our contacts for others who, like most of us here, want to work toward a healthier self, and allow ourselves a healthier sense of self in the process. So why not make use of all those new connections?

About a year ago some online friends and I started a private Google group, Girlz Under There, to support each other while we, each in our own way, began to dig out that healthy, vibrant, happy girl buried under all those layers of… you name it. Fat, stress, shame, fatigue,and  myriad other health and energy issues. It became a safe, virtual space we could gather for motivation and ideas, where we knew that everyone else was experiencing the same kinds of things we were, where we could be ourselves, but expect to be challenged to become our best selves.

Starting your own ass-kickin’ online support group will only take a few minutes, but having a few parameters in place before you recruit members will help you get the most out of it.

Ask yourself: What’s the point?
When you’ve got your eye out for people who would make good additions to your group, first know what your group’s specific goals are. Maybe it’s to educate each other on healthy living, and motivate one another to make those choices consistently. Maybe it’s to take a tough-love approach to exercise and getting out there. Maybe it’s to trade war stories about weight loss so we don’t feel like we’re on that road alone. Or maybe it’s a group specifically for posting progress photos. The more specific your goal, the more likely the group will succeed in staying on track.

Find people with the right stuff
A group is only as good as each individual that participates in it. Surprise: groups like these don’t typically thrive on the clouds of fluffy optimism, but with engine created by motivated realists. Look for people who say what they mean, mean what they say, and call it like the see it without being rude or insulting. When you’ve eaten half a birthday cake in one sitting and failed to change out of your PJs for three days, you don’t need a cheerleader telling you “Awww, that’s okay… you deserve it!” You need someone to ask, “What the heck is going on with you?” And to expect an answer.

Unfortunately, we’re wired to believe that being a supportive friend means rah-rahing everything our friends do, even if we’re afraid it may hurt them in the long run. That means you may need to do a little diplomatic weeding to make sure that well-meaning enablers stay on the fringes to cheerlead, while the inner circle runs on the energy of people ready to get real.

Similarly, you’ll want to be sure to screen out anyone who’s prone to jealousy, passive-aggressiveness or who isn’t completely invested in the group’s success. Not only can these folks be a buzz-kill, they’re dangerous to the group’s sense of trust and openness. It’s hard to feel good about a victory, much less share it out loud, when you’re internally preparing yourself for disguised backlash or even woe-is-me responses from someone else.

Pick your venue
Communities like Yahoo! Groups and Google Groups let members post, read and manage messages, calendars and polls easily by email. Social networks like Ning and Facebook groups provide a more free-form, media-rich group experience, and good, old-fashioned email lists in your address book will do the trick too. Just make sure your venue matches your groups goals, and the way your members naturally prefer to interact.

Pick your strategy
Your group shouldn’t be so structured that it’s hard to fit into everyone’s daily life, but it should have some guidelines for how you’ll work on achieving your goals. Need some ideas?

+ Create a contest. Examples: member with the most number of exercise days each month wins a prize, or member who submits the most inspiring, healthy menu for the week wins. Have a group fund for small prizes like cookbooks or movie tickets.

+ Have each member take a turn posting a delicious, healthy recipe each week, while another member posts a new, interesting, easy-to-do exercise for the group to try.

+ Have a weekly check-in on goal progress, discussing what worked and what didn’t that week, and what each member plans to do in the upcoming week. Hold each other to those goals.

+ Have each member take turns being boot camp captain each week, issuing challenges to other members. Challenges can be activity-related, or even just a challenge for each member to incorporate one cup of blueberries a day into their diets for the week.

+ Meet up when someone reaches their goal! What better way to celebrate a friend’s success, and to motivate ourselves to keep moving toward ours, than to spend some face-to-face party time with the people we’ve been making that journey with. At the very least, pick a spot once or twice a year to get together for a weekend to pow-wow and infuse fresh, exciting energy into the coming months’ challenges.

No matter how you structure your group, make a commitment to it and ask that others do the same. Nothing will kill a group like fizzling participation from members, so when things start to lilt, and they sometimes will, try injecting new ideas to get them bouncing again. If members still aren’t participating, politely ask them to move on so you keep a core of motivated folks moving.

Do you have a group, or are you planning to start one? Share your ideas and questions here in comments, and if you start an open group and want to invite FGG members, let us know! Happy ass-kicking!