638-P: Social Media as a Source of Personalized Weight-Loss Information

People with obesity may seek clinical, nutritional, activity, and psychosocial guidance, but recommendations they receive in clinical settings may be inadequate or lack sufficient personalization to be implemented into their lives. Understanding unmet information needs may enable more tailored weight guidance. We used health narratives posted in a weight loss forum to research topics of information being sought. Public posts (N=52,576) from 1/2020-1/2022 were extracted from r/LoseIt, a Reddit weight loss forum of 3.8M members. From these, 63,006 questions were extracted using a research-purpose BERT language model tested and fine-tuned on 500 hand-annotated questions. Extracted questions were clustered into distinct topics by Top2Vec and hierarchical clustering. Excluding 2 uninterpretable topics, 27 of 28 (96%) topics represented requests for personalized recommendations. Topics focused on diet (7%), exercise (7%), sensemaking (11%), how to implement a behavior change or solve a weight-loss problem (11%), tips for specific stages of weight loss (beginning, plateau) (7%), and comparing weight loss experiences (11%). Weight-loss forum users requested personalized recommendations to support sensemaking of frustrating weight loss problems and ask for help choosing and deploying behavior change. Results call for interventions customized to individuals’ weight loss stage, process, experiences, and motivations.