Bet on Losing Weight - The Latest Brilliant Dieting Craze.

There’s a wonderful new method of losing weight with help from a website, it’s called Bet Dieting.  Basically you bet money that you will lose a certain amount of weight in a given time frame.  You place your stake online with the website.  If you fail in your endeavours to lose weight you forfeit your money to charity - but - you can choose a charity you hate!

This insightful idea taps right into the psychology of dieting.  Often it is difficult to keep the long-term good in mind about losing weight.  When faced with an instant fix of sausage roll or cream cake, it’s easy to forget your long-term goals of losing weight and say “oh, well just this once”.

Bet dieting gives you another incentive to shed the pounds - a financial one.  It also diverts the mind away from the daily grind that dieting can become and gives you something else to think about, a new incentive.  It’s like exercise machines which are electronic and set you goals, or present you with a sort of video game related to your exercise output.  It makes it fun, and also it has a point.  Charities ultimately benefit.  You can choose a charity you love, but then you might think “oh never mind, my money went to a great cause, I still feel good about myself”.

But I imagine you thinking “charity is a good thing - I can’t imagine a charity I would hate”. Think about it though - we all have our preferences and priorities.  Perhaps you love your garden and you’re fed up with other people’s cats soiling it.  Then pledge your lost money to the Cats Protection League.  Maybe you dislike all animals - RSPCA?  Hate dogs?  Battersea Dogs Home.  Have an aversion to Greyhounds?  kerrygreyhounds.co.uk, or the Greyhound Trust.

If you think more money should be going to Help the Aged, then pledge your money to Childline.  If you have an enemy who is a curmudgenly old bloke, then you might prefer to spend your “lost” money on on the NSPCC.  Perhaps you are unconvinced on some Green issues.  Pledge your money to Greenpeace then.  I think when we think about it, we can all find something we are against, or at least something which we wouldn’t dream of giving money to.

OK, it’s not quite like winning the lottery, but it is a sort of game you play with your money and ultimately it’s a win-win situation.  You lose weight because you don’t want your money to go to a disliked charity, so great!  You fail to lose weight - oh dear, your money goes, but “it’s all in a good cause” whether that cause would be last on your list or not.

The other incentive is that your weight loss - or not - is relayed by email to a group of friends and family of your choice, so there is a “shaming” element to this as well, always a good incentive the threat of humiliation or disappointment from your peers.  Weight loss has to be monitored by a referee, by the way.

This scheme started in America and is claimed to have an 85% success rate, and people in the UK are taking to it bigstyle right now.

It’s a marvellous idea, to take your money - if you fail - and send it to a charity which goes against all you believe.  Jordan Goldberg, the co-founder of the StickK bet dieting site, says “We chose some highly contentious issues, for instance global warming, abortion and gay marriage”.  Imagine if you were fervently anti-abortion and your money would be going to a pro-abortion charity if you failed to lose weight - surely this would make you lose those pounds!  You would be so niggled, so peeved, so very cross to part with money for something with which you fervently disagree.

Doctors are skeptical about the long-term effects, rightly stating that incentives can be great but when the incentive is removed then recidivism would be rife.  Surely the answer is to continue to use the website even when trying to maintain current weight?

This could turn out to be a very powerful tool to help people to lose weight.  For example, take exercise.  If all you do is “walk” or “run” with no other incentives, it gets boring and you stop.
Exercise can be hard to keep going with because of the boredom factor, so it is best to do an exercise which has other motivations built in - competitive team sports, wildlife and countryside walking, learning a new skill like martial arts or bellydancing.  Thus it’s not the only motivation to “lose weight” or “tone up”, you start to enjoy the exercise for it’s own sake, you are competing, learning new steps, seeing a Barn Owl on your walks, or increasing self respect and self-defence skills.  All these are other incentives to do your exercise and can be more powerful than just “losing weight”.

The same applies here - and it would work better the more political an animal you are.  If you are very opinionated there are bound to be charities and lobbies and issues you passionately disagree with.  If so, pick them so that if you fail to shed weight, they get the benefit!  Such powerful psychology is at work here!

The concept works for so many things - you make a contract to do anything you want in life-enhancement terms: practise your guitar, dance every day, climb a mountain, eat a portion of fruit, anything you like.  This “commitment contract concept” makes it easier to stick to a commitment because you have an added incentive and you are being (if you wish) peer-reviewed.