

Dieting? Put Your Money Where Your Fat Is  - jakewolf
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/05/health/nutrition/05fitness.html?em=&pagewanted=all

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yesimahuman
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...

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

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nullproc
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.

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tocomment
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.

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scw
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.

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tocomment
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.

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hrabago
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.

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dpapathanasiou
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).

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spolsky
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.

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mkn
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.

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CalmQuiet
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.

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jakewolf
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)

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hachiya
<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.

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

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jonas_b
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.

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zealog
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>

