Rolls of Dough: Should we pay people to lose weight?
Print
Comment
Email
RSS
Twitter
Judgments: Opinions on the news.
Rolls of Dough
Should we pay people to lose weight?
By Brandon Fuller
Posted Sunday, December 21, 2008 - 8:30pm
Our best-laid plans to stick to a healthy diet often fail during the holidays. It's a predictable cycle: indulgence from Thanksgiving on, followed by near-fasting and a frantic gym surge after the BCS title game. But a recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests we can skip the treadmill drudgery in January if we set the right financial incentives to keep the extra weight off in the first place. And when it comes to our health, well-designed monetary prods can do more than just help us avoid the holiday pounds.
About 70 percent of America is classified as overweight or obese. A smart mix of public and private monetary incentives could help people lose weight and lead longer, healthier lives. To see how, we need to know a bit about why it is so difficult to drop weight in the first place.
Part of the reason we struggle with weight is genetic, but part is behavioral. When we set our goals for diet and exercise, we tend to underestimate how we'll behave when faced with the temptations that threaten to undermine weight control. So say the authors of Nudge, a primer on behavioral economics. They point out that we have two personas when it comes to eating and exercise: the calculated Planner and the impulsive Doer. Weight control is so difficult in part because it's all too easy for the Doer to derail the Planner.
Our Planner intends to exercise regularly and enjoy smaller portions. Our Doer, meanwhile, gets caught up in the moment, aroused by the wonders of food, drink, and couch surfing. In our cold, calculated Planner state we prefer to eat well and stay fit. But in our hot, impulsive Doer state we can't resist immediate gratification for the far-off benefits of longer, healthier lives.
George Lowenstein, a behavioral economist who co-authored the December medical study, calls this the hot-cold-empathy gap. According to Lowenstein's logic, we need an incentive for the Doer to relate to the noble goals of the Planner. Lowenstein's latest medical study tries to identify the incentives that can keep our Doer in check and our Planner in control. The findings suggest that putting some money on the line is a great way to self-police your good intentions.
Lowenstein and his colleagues randomly assigned participants to one of three weight plans, with the goal of dropping 16 pounds in 16 weeks. While the control group received no explicit financial incentive for making their goal, other groups did. One incentive involved participants depositing their own money in an account. If they hit their weight targets, they got the money back with matched funds. If they didn't, they lost the deposit.
Comments
Want to reply to a comment? Click "Reply" at the bottom of the comment; after being approved your comment will appear directly underneath the comment you replied to.
Pay me to quit smoking
The article is dumb. much easier to loose weight than to quit smoking but despite how stigmatized smokers are our insurance doesn't even cover smoking cessation methods. F the fat people, it's not an addiction it's a behaviour they can change much more easily than one can quit smoking. But no one ever suggested paying smokers to quit, worse, no insurance company would even cover the patch or a meeting with a hypnotist.
Multiple studies show that
Multiple studies show that yo-yo dieting is actually worse for health than if a chronic dieter had remained fat. Dieting failure rates hover between 90 - 95 percent, with most dieters not only regaining the weight they lost but even more within five years. And as anyone who has lost weight will tell you, sustaining a weight loss is often more difficult than losing it.
As someone who has maintained a weight loss of more than 100 pounds for five years now, I propose this instead: Instead of paying people to lose weight, let's pay those people who sustain their weight loss the longest. Or, here's another novel idea: Instead of paying fat people to lose weight, let's instead use that money to subsidize fresh fruits and vegetables so that they're more affordable and cheaper than processed foods.
pay me to lose weight?
I'm sure I would lose more weight if someone were to pay me to do so. I would also lose more weight if I knew someone would be seeing what I actually weighed every week. That's why Weight Watchers works for some people. Perhaps first we should try some kind of program that allows people to see their doctor for a weekly weight check visit. If insurance paid for it, I'm sure people would sign up.
There are incentives other than monetary ones that might work. Once, my sister and her boyfriend bet a certain sexual favor that she could lose 10 pounds in a month. That was serious incentive because she didn't like to do it! You know, I don't think she lost it though...
That said, I think putting up half your annual income is a bit much! Although, it is a wonderful incentive.
behavior modification
nlittlemoney, I think you are drawing the wrong conclusion from this article.
By linking financial gain to a behavior people are more likely to reach the desired outcome, in this case weight loss. People cannot manage their DNA or shoe size. They can and should manage their weight.
A friend of mine and I successfully quit smoking using similar behavioral modification. We made a pact that if either of us smoked we would pay the other $50 per cigarette.
It required trusting the other person to be truthful about whether they smoked. But the issue for me wasn't about the money. It was about successfully quitting after 12 years of smoking. The $50 a cig just was another tool to battle cravings. I had to stop and think, is it really worth fifty bucks for one smoke (or lying to a friend's face)?
It's been 13 months since my last cigarette.
Should we pay people to lose weight?
Ha ha Brandon,
Would you be interested to see the health insurance companies increase your premium for having a few extra pounds?
How about the next step, increase your premium because you are the carrier of some genes deemed risky by your HIC, in your DNA?
Why not doing the same thing for people who have their IQ lower than a predefined IQ level? (For the ones with a higher IQ it would be quite difficult).
Maybe even increasing the premium for those of us who have smaller or larger feet than most of the population? I am absolutely sure that a study that can link feet size and a heart condition can be put together (maybe even with a control group, not sure if double blinded or not) and the conclusions made to fit the needed thesis.
How about a study linking the associated increased stress because of the long-term exposure to fear for health insurance premium rise over the few extra pounds?
Yes, behavioral economics is so full of ... "wisdom".
So are all those full-of-nothing-useful pseudo-scientific studies conducted by would be scientists with no real world scientific work, only pseudo research work.
We can start something else, pay me in order to stop posting replies ;-)
That would be just fine for me. As long as you keep paying me the virtual agreed upon sum of money I will not write an kind of reply. From time to time I will post something just as a reminder :-)
Oh, these studies and their proponents are killing all the joy in those people who make the mistake of taking seriously such out of reality claims.
Have a fat-free day!