Dieting? Put Your Money Where Your Fat Is

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/05/health/nutrition/05fitness.html?em=&pagewanted=all

by jakewolf • 17 years ago

17 21 17 years ago

hrabago• 17 years ago

I'm familiar with the effectiveness of monetary incentives, and I've often wondered if I should use it on myself. For instance, should I sign up for a hosting service even though I don't have anything to launch right away? That would give me the incentive to (a) get done, and (b) not wait until everything is perfect before launching.

dpapathanasiou• 17 years ago

If your hosting bill is small relative to your income/savings, the financial incentive may not be as strong a motivator as you think.

I noticed the article cited cases where the people worked together or had some other social contact.

I wonder if the real motivator is not so much money as peer pressure or "social proof" (as Robert B. Cialdini might say).

rjprins• 17 years ago

This isn't actually about money, that was the reporters conclusion. The real incentive is the social pressure. It's a challenge to perform better than your mates.

tocomment2• 17 years ago

Sounds like a cool idea for a startup. Anyone interested? I've been looking for something not completely "web toolish" and something that actually matters (it would make people healthier). This seems to fit the bill.

scw• 17 years ago

They mention a company doing just that: http://www.stickK.com/

The idea of using people's innate biases to help them is compelling, I especially enjoyed that the 'anti-charities' of causes you dislike had the highest success rate.

tocomment2• 17 years ago

They're ok, but I'm thinking something just focused on weight loss. More specific is better. I think our company would also be the "referee" to give the service more legitimacy.

jakewolf3• 17 years ago

I'm working on a site to help people lower their cholesterol using similar money/group/contest techniques. Hoping it helps as a vegan, very low oil diet isn't very appealing to meat eaters. Too bad some people wait to have a heart attack before changing habits. (Open to working with others on this project)

hachiya• 17 years ago

http://heartattackproof.com and the videos by Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn (Google his name for videos) should be enough to motivate people to change how they eat. It's a fact that heart disease is found in 12 year olds, and some authorities estimate that this will be the first generation where the parents will outlive their kids. Dr. Esselstyn, Dr. John McDougall, Dr. Dean Ornish, and their colleagues have shown how a low-fat plant based diet can prevent and even reverse heart disease. Note that this is FAR different than the low-fat diets used in many of the studies the media has reported on. 30% of calories from fat is not enough. 10% is where these programs aim.

The good news is that the foods are actually very delicious. One just needs to be open enough to investigate what is actually allowed and not be biased by a "vegan" misconception. There are many unhealthy vegetarian and vegan diets. The diets recommended by the above doctors are a healthy plant-based diet, as opposed to many of the junk food veggie diets.

jakewolf3• 17 years ago

I used his diet. Lost 60 points in 35 days. All those docs and their books are eye poppingly awesome

yesimahuman2• 17 years ago

I hope they didn't just do the simple BMI calculation...that is really inaccurate.

It's not hard to lose weight if you are just trying to lose pounds: you just stop eating as much and don't do any weight training. Your body will burn away your lean muscle mass and you'll lose water weight depending on how you cut. The thing is though that without the muscle your metabolism goes down and you just gain it back...

jimbokun• 17 years ago

What's a better measure you can do on your own?

yesimahuman2• 17 years ago

Maybe I should have said that it doesn't really mean anything. Your weight is affected by more than just fat. If you happen to be pretty muscular your BMI will be higher (and thus more closer to obesity on the BMI scale), despite having more of the "good stuff"

There are some home scales that do electrical impedance testing but they are inaccurate too.

I think that the BMI calculation that is done at home is bad for people trying to get in shape. They worry too much about the BMI and not about the important stuff such as building muscle which will help you keep the fat off in the long run.

scott_s• 17 years ago

Physical fitness tests. How fast can you run a mile? How many pushups can you do in a minute? Situps? How many pullups can you do?

Most people don't just need to "lose weight," they need to improve their overall fitness. If you're overweight, then increasing your fitness will include losing weight, but it's not everything. And the best measure of your physical fitness are simple physical exercises.

jakewolf3• 17 years ago

I use my belt holes! AT 5'9, 195lbs my BMI is borderline obese but I'm in great shape.

nullproc• 17 years ago

Take what I say with a grain of salt as fitness is different for everybody.

I've gone through several cycles where I have gained and then lost weight. Right now I am in another weight-loss cycle as a result of a overly sedentary lifestyle; this is the hardest "comeback" that I have ever staged.

When People ask me what my goals are I always tell them that I want to loose 30lbs. I don't elaborate any further unless they show a real interest in what I'm doing.

In all actuality, my real goal is to loose an "aparent 30lbs." Essentially, when I have reached my initial fitness goals I want to physically appear as if I were 30lbs lighter. Since my regimen is a combination of diet, aerobic exercise, and weight training the actual metrics at the end of my goal will most likely result in me having lost some weight, but also having gained some weight as muscle mass; this is, in my opinion the healthiest way to approach weight loss.

Having said that, normal metrics such as BMI, and weight are not good indicators of improvement. Its actually better, at least for me, to use much simpler criteria. In my case I look at easily measurable things: Am I getting stronger? Is my cardiovascular training getting longer and/or harder? Am I sleeping better at night? How are my sustained energy levels throughout the day? Am I staying fully hydrated? Am I handling stress better? Is my overall attitude positive? And finally, do I see visual improvement by taking a self-photo every 2 weeks?

Really I only check things like weight and body fat % at the end of a particular fitness goal and even then I don't give it much credence.

jwilliams• 17 years ago

Waist circumference and BMI together give a decent measure...

In fact, wait circumference is pretty important, especially for me. Central Obesity (i.e. the stomach, love handles, etc) is correlated with a lot of health problems - much stronger correlation that just being overweight in general.

Other than that, the pinch test works well too.

jonas_b• 17 years ago

Perhaps it just me who's a food nerd, but from the title I thought the article would be about substituting cheap unhealthy fat, like fries, for expensive stuff such as avacados. Which, incidentally, is great way to live healthier.

CalmQuiet• 17 years ago

Fascinating possibilities. Note that for some of the folks who participated it was excitement about the competition not just the money that drove them in the weight-loss bet.

In any case... great innovation: applying old principles (competition & financial incentives) in new ways to new realms. Like with smoking cessations, sometimes you have to just try several different strategies until you find one that works for your mind/body system.

I am reminded of the maxim, "Insanity may be defined as continuing to employ repeatedly the same strategies and expecting to get different results.

spolsky• 17 years ago

That is really weird. People won't lose weight to add another 5-10 years to their lives but they will for a few hundred bucks.

mkn• 17 years ago

There's actually a wonderful insight into human evolutionary psychology here. We've evolved to discount the future. We are finite beings and all of our eggs are in one basket. For a large part of our biological history, performing beneficial tasks such as eating or mating was best performed in the present, because you might not be around next month to do them. There might be a famine, or you might get injured, thus causing your prospective mate to choose a healthier candidate. Courses of action that result in benefits now (or the prevention of an immediate loss) are much more compelling than courses of action that have a benefit in the distant future.

There's a great website about procrastination, http://www.procrastinus.com/, that uses this understanding of future discounting to help one get things done. The idea is that a long project should be broken up into smaller tasks so that, even though meeting the smaller goals results in less absolute reward, they are more compelling because the completion horizon is so close.

Basically, humans are wired so that a jelly donut (or a few hundred bucks) now is perceived as more beneficial than 5 to 10 years of existence tacked on at the end of life. For a very long time, that has been a very sensible proposition.

zealog• 17 years ago

For me, the money wouldn't do it. I need competition. It actually works and I was winning until yesterday. http://zealog.com/zealogs/the-smaller-losers

Dieting? Put Your Money Where Your Fat Is

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