Making Weight Loss Worth Your While

To loosely quote a famous author: You should know what you will or will not do for love or money. We all have our limits, but for most, money is a temptation and can be irresistible under the right circumstances. One of those "right" circumstances appears to be losing weight for financial gain. With the growing obesity crisis in the U.S., paid weight loss could reduce health care costs if, in the growing recession, there was enough money to foot the bill.

Dr. Kevin Volpp of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine was looking for an effective way to treat obesity. Obesity is a health hazard and contributes to heart disease and stroke, high blood pressure, diabetes, cancer, and other health problems. Volpp said, “Weight-loss programs fail because people are being asked to make sacrifices for rewards in the future.” Our society wants instant gratification and does not like waiting for results. 

Volpp was the head of the study that related weight loss to financial benefits among participants. The study was published in the December 10th issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. “We wanted to create a reward system which gave them rewards in the present,” said Volpp.

Two kinds of incentive programs were studied by Volpp and his colleagues. One was a lottery-based design in which participants played a lottery and were allowed to collect their winnings if they met their weight-loss target. Lotteries were run daily and people were told what they would have won if they had met their target weight loss. The second incentive was a deposit contract, in which participants invested a small amount of their own money, 1¢ to $3 per day, which they would lose if they failed to reach their goal at the end of the month. The incentive deposit contract group also received a bonus if they met their goal, but only at the end of the month.

A group of 57 obese but otherwise healthy people were assigned to one of the incentive groups or to a third control group. The people in the control group were weighed at the end of each month but their reward was their weight loss. The goal for each individual was to weigh 16 pounds less at the end of four months.
The researchers were hoping that that theory that people are highly motivated to avoid monetary losses would prove strong enough to motivate their weight loss.

Individuals in the incentive groups lost far more weight than those who received no pay for their efforts. Half of the participants in the both reward groups met their weight loss goals. Those in the lottery group earned a total of $378.49 and lost around 13 pounds. People in the deposit group got $272.80 and lost 14 pounds. The control group lost about 4 pounds after 4 months.
The studies produced highly effective short term weight loss, but according to Volpp when the money stopped the weight began to increase.

Martin Binks, PhD., director of behavioral studies at the Duke Diet and Fitness Center in North Carolina notes that offering cash rewards for weight loss isn’t a new idea. Binks, who was not involved in the Volpp study, told WebMD that reward programs can be effective in the short term, but that the diet center sees 750 new people a day, and 750 more who return for help losing weight. Long-term weight loss involves a deeper personal level. Those involved understand the consequences of everyday actions to broader personal goals.

Volpp admits that cash rewarded weight loss has never been tested in long-term programs. Binks agrees that reward programs can get people on the right track, but he doesn’t think the result would be permanent behavior changes. The only way for permanent change is if the behavior changes are seen as part of a bigger picture. People need to value their own well being if changes are truly going to last.