Losing weight might be a matter of getting paid. Losing weight is easier when money is involved, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday. Weight-loss programs that reward people with money – and remind them of the cash they stand to lose if they fail – provided a powerful incentive to lose weight, compared with more conventional approaches. Dr. Kevin Volpp of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine was looking for an effective way to treat obesity, a growing problem that carries serious health risks, when he happened upon the finding. He said many weight-loss programs fail because people are being asked to make sacrifices now for rewards in the future. “We wanted to create a reward system which gave them rewards in the present,” said Volpp, whose study appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Volpp and colleagues studied two kinds of incentive programs for weight loss: 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; the other was a deposit contract, in which participants invested a small amount of their own money – between 1 cent and $3 per day – which they would lose at the end of the month if they failed to reach their goals. People in the lottery incentive groups lost far more weight than those who got no pay for their efforts, with about half of the participants in each group meeting their weight loss goals. People who were enticed with money earned a total of $378.49 and lost about 13 pounds (5.9 kg), while people in the deposit group got $272.80 and lost 14 pounds (6.35 kg). Those in the control group, who were merely rewarded by better-fitting jeans, lost about 4 pounds after four months.

TAGS: getting paid, losing weight, study

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