This article appeared in the USA TODAY and it made me laugh .
Slim down your body, fatten your piggy bank .
Nanci Hellmich, USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2008-01-01-diet-for-money_N.htmIf you're looking for a little extra motivation to lose weight this year, consider this: Would you be more inspired if your boss offered you cash for losing 10 pounds? What if your spouse or best friend promised to give you an iPod or 100 bucks if you drop 20 pounds in three months? Would this motivate you or not?
Money and other rewards can inspire people to trim down, says Eric Finkelstein, one of the nation's top experts on the economic impact of obesity.
YOUR VIEW: What kind of incentives have or would motivate you to lose weight?
"Paying people to lose weight is a low-cost motivational strategy because you don't spend any money unless people do what you want them to do," says Finkelstein of RTI International, a non-profit research organization in Research Triangle Park, N.C.
Finkelstein and colleagues at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill recruited more than 200 overweight people. A third were not offered a financial incentive to lose weight. Another third were offered $7 for every 1% drop in their body weight; the last third were offered $14 for every 1% decrease.
After three months, those who weren't offered money lost an average of 2 pounds. Those in the $7 group lost 3 pounds; those in the $14 group lost 5.
"That little bit of money made a difference. The trick is to find ways to keep those incentives coming so the weight stays off the entire year," says Finkelstein, co-author of The Fattening of America, out next week.
Finkelstein knows losing is not easy, and in fact, he believes it's much harder to lose or maintain your weight today than it was 30 to 40 years ago. "Food is cheaper and more readily available, plus there are all these labor-saving technologies at work and at home. It's not easy to be physically active."
Robert Jeffery, director of the University of Minnesota Obesity Prevention Center, has conducted several studies on financial incentives and supports their use as motivators of behavior change. He has found that it's better to pay smaller amounts at the beginning of a program and then increase the sum.
So a company might give an employee $1 a pound for losing the first 5 pounds and then $5 a pound for the next 5 to 10 pounds, he says. "You get a better return on your investment" because people are usually enthusiastic to begin with but then start "running out of gas."
Some firms have been successful with weight-loss contests in which employees win cash or earn money for charity, he says.
That said, Jeffery believes people respond better to threats of losing money than to the potential of gaining the same amount.
He has researched deposit-contract incentives in which participants turned over some money, and he agreed to return it if they met their goals. People also were given intensive diet and exercise counseling. They lost more weight with contracts and counseling than with counseling alone.
Psychologist Thomas Wadden, an obesity researcher at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia, says these kinds of incentives may work best for people who are already motivated and don't have a serious weight problem. "They are a symbolic recognition of dieters' hard work and accomplishments."
The incentive doesn't have to be money; it could be a small gift or a favor like babysitting, he says.
But some people's price may be higher than others. In one study, he and colleagues offered teens a small amount of money for keeping a food diary and losing weight, but the researchers couldn't pay the kids enough to inspire them. "Kids today have so much spending money that we couldn't compete," Wadden says.
He believes there's a downside to offering financial incentives. It implies anyone can lose weight by trying harder, but that's not true for everyone, he says.
"We see people in our clinics who have had a serious problem with their weight since they were children. They've made multiple efforts and paid thousands of dollars to try to lose weight," says Wadden. "For those individuals, clearly there is a lot of biology controlling their weight."
Compensation-for-weight-loss strategies have potential, Jeffery notes, but you don't know who they'll inspire until you try.
