Reddit’s /r/progresspics/ is a forum dedicated to showing progress made in weight loss and weight gain. Users post before and after photos of themselves. This is usually for weight loss pictures, but there are also a few weight gain pictures (including people who are recovering from anorexia or gaining muscle).

It’s a community where users can go and show off their fitness and diet goals. Others use the community as a source of inspiration by looking at weight loss success stories. It’s a great community and if you want to share how far you have gone in transforming your body, /r/progresspics/ is a good place to do so.

The /r/progresspics/ subreddit has close to 290,000 subscribers that will automatically view posts from that subreddit when they are logged in to Reddit. Reddit works on a voting system, when posts that users find useful, funny, inspiring or positive in some other way get an “upvote” while those that are found to be unhelpful, mean, stupid, or negative in some other way get a “downvote”. These posts can be arranged to show the top upvoted posts of all time.

What I did was take a look at the top posts of all time for /r/progresspics/ to see what makes a post great.

I collected over 900 of the top posts from the subreddit. I then removed the posts that did not include a starting or ending weight. I also removed at least two cat progress pictures and at least one dog progress pictures, where fat cats and fat dogs lost weight.

I tried to find the following information for each post:

Height of the poster

Sex of the poster

How much they weighed in their heavy photo (heigh weight)

How much they weighted in their light weight photo (low weight)

Age of the poster

This data was not always available, but if a post included at least the high weight and the low weight, I included it. The data is in pounds and inches. (Note, 60 inches is 5 feet.)

Some Things I Noticed

The very first thing I noticed when I gathered all this data is the much larger amount of weight loss to weight gain and the much larger amount of female posts to male posts.

The number of posts who show weight gain is only 31, compared to the 839 who show weight loss.

There are 688 posts featuring women, while only 218 featuring men in the top posts of /r/progresspics/.

Weight Loss v Weight Gain

Here is a graph showing the high weight versus the low weight. The blue points are those who lost weight, the yellow are those who gained weight:

I would guess that most people in the world are more concerned about weight loss than weight gain, so it makes sense that most of the top posts are by those who lost weight. I would venture to say that most of the posters on /r/progresspics/ have gone through a weight loss transformation. There are other subreddits that are specifically for those who gain weight/muscle. You can read what I found about a subreddit that is mostly men who gained weight here.

Male and female posters had about the same ratio of weight gain posts to weight loss posts (about 3-4% of the posts are weight gain posts.)

For those who lost weight, the weight lost versus starting weight distribution looks like this:

As one might expect, those who started out weighing more lost more weight.

Male v Female Posts

The reason for a high female to male ratio is a bit less obvious. Maybe there are more women who are trying to better themselves through weight loss/weight gain. Maybe women’s weight change progress is more impressive. Another theory might be that Reddit is a male dominant forum, and photos of women in their underwear get more upvotes than photos of men in their underwear.

The male versus female posts showing the posters high and low weights looks like this:

One thing that is noticeable is that men’s high weight is a lot higher than women’s high weights. Women have an average high weight of 227lbs while men have one of 310lbs. Men are generally taller than women, so that might have something to do with it. The male posts had an average height of 5’8, while women were 5’4.

As seen here, the taller the poster, the more weight their lost:

Another theory as to why the top posts of men have higher weights than women relies on two ideas. One is that losing more weight is more impressive. The second is that women /r/progresspics/ posters are more likely to get more upvotes than men.

Women lost an average of 75lbs while men lost an average of 118lbs.

This is what a graph of weight change versus high weight looks like for those who lost weight:

There are a lot more men on the right side of this graph. These are men who started at a very high weight and lost a lot of weight. There are more women on the left side of the graph. These women started at a lower weight and lost less weight.

However, in the middle of the graph, the amount lost by men and women seems to be around the same. If we take the data and exclude any post that had a starting weight of less than 200lbs or a starting weight of more than 350lbs, we find that the results are actually really similar for both men and women.

The number of female posts that lost weight within this range was 384, while the number of male posts was 131.

For the above range of between 200lbs and 350lbs starting weight, women lost an average of 99lbs while men lost an average of 86lbs. That’s a much smaller difference, indicating that there is little difference in the amount lost for men and women in this middle range.

For all the top posts, the source of the difference in average weight lost between males and females is due to a larger number of posts by males who were very heavy and lost a lot of weight and by females who were not very overweight and lost less weight. This is what the graph looks like for posts between 200lbs and 350lbs starting weight:

Compared With New Posts

I wanted to see how the top posts shown above relate to the new posts on /r/progresspics/. On Reddit you can organize a subreddit to show only the newest posts. These posts are not ordered in terms of upvotes and downvotes, but by the date posted. This will help with finding any bias in the top posts of the subreddit.

I looked at 992 new posts for /r/progresspics/.

Here are some differences between the new and top posts:

Stat New Top average change in weight 54 83 average height 65 68 average age 25 25 posters who lost weight 850 839 posters who gained weight 82 31 average amount lost for losers 57 86 female posters 467 688 male posters 525 218

The most noticeable difference is the sex of the posters. There’s actually more men who recently posted on /r/progresspics/ than women, but women dominate the top 900 posts of the subreddit.

This graph shows the male to female breakup of new posts. As you can see, men and women are much more evenly distributed than in the top posts of the subreddit.

Whatever the reason, there is a lot more female posts in the top scoring posts than in the new posts.

Average Weight

The following is a box and whisker plot showing the average end weight for each post versus height. This means that those who lost weight, the weight used is their low weight. For those who gained weight, the high weight is used.

This should give an idea of what a good looking weight is for each height.

Remember, these these are posts where there posters are proud of their end weight and the reddit community was impressed enough to give them a bunch of upvotes. These might not be the ideal weights, but they are the weights at which people feel and look good. Taking the average of all these weights should give a good range of what a good looking and healthy person should weigh at a certain height.

Also, note that there are not as many short and tall people, so the range on the ends of the above chart might be skewed. The heights in the middle of the chart are going to have better data. For example, someone who is 5 feet 6 inches tall is likely to look good around 150lbs, according to the chart above.

Here are the statistics:

/r/progresspics/’s Top Posts

number of posts analyzed 907

number of posts with unknown high weight 0

number of posts with unknown low weight 0

number of posts with unknown height 13

number of posts with unknown age 14

number of posts with unknown sex 1 (This is a transgender poster who I decided not to include due to potential hormone treatment during their transition)

Averages

average high weight 247

average low weight 164

average change in weight 83

average height 65

average age 25

Weight Loss v Weight Gain

number of posts who probably lost weight 839

number of posts who probably gained weight 31

number of posts who have unknown/unchanged weight: 37

Those Who Lost Weight

average high weight for losers 252

average low weight for losers 166

average amount lost for losers 86

max amount lost for losers 410

min amount lost for losers 4

Those Who Gained Weight

average high weight for gainers 137

average low weight for gainers 102

average amount gained for gainers 35

max amount gained for gainers 67

min amount gained for gainers 8

Male v Female

Female Posts

number of female posts 688

number of posts with unknown high weight 0

number of posts with unknown low weight 0

number of posts with unknown height 5

number of posts with unknown age 9

Averages

average high weight 227

average low weight 154

average change in weight 73

average height 64

average age 25

Weight Loss v Weight Gain

number of posts who probably lost weight 636

number of posts who probably gained weight 22

number of posts who have unknown/unchanged weight: 30

Those Who Lost Weight

average high weight for losers 231

average low weight for losers 155

average amount lost for losers 75

max amount lost for losers 290

min amount lost for losers 4

Those Who Gained Weight

average high weight for gainers 125

average low weight for gainers 92

average amount gained for gainers 33

max amount gained for gainers 67

min amount gained for gainers 8

Male Posts

number of male posts 218

number of posts with unknown high weight 0

number of posts with unknown low weight 0

number of posts with unknown height 8

number of posts with unknown age 5

Averages

average high weight 310

average low weight 196

average change in weight 114

average height 68

average age 27

Weight Loss v Weight Gain

number of posts who probably lost weight 203

number of posts who probably gained weight 8

number of posts who have unknown/unchanged weight: 7

Those Who Lost Weight

average high weight for losers 318

average low weight for losers 199

average amount lost for losers 118

max amount lost for losers 410

min amount lost for losers 5

Those Who Gained Weight