Financial Incentives Aid In Short-term Weight Loss
A new study finds that offering financial incentives to obese people may help them shed extra pounds, but the added motivation doesn’t last for long.
The small study, in which people stood to lose cash if they failed to lose weight, showed that such a program produced only initial, short-term results.Â
The researchers found that study participants who signed a "deposit contract" they put their own money at risk lost an average of nine pounds over eight months, compared with just one pound among the participants who risked none of their money.
However, nine months after the program ended, the financial-incentive group had gained back most of their weight.
The findings suggest that financial incentives can motivate people to lose weight in the short term, but maintaining that weight loss remains a struggle.
"That’s the great challenge," said Leslie John of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, who led the study.
"This is just another example of how hard weight-loss maintenance is,” she told Reuters.
Nevertheless, the findings, along with those from previous studies, suggest that financial incentives can work, she added.
Incentives "are really effective in the short- and medium-term," John said.
The challenge now is how to make them pay off in the long run, she added.
For the current study, John and her colleagues randomly assigned 66 obese adults, mostly men, to either have a counseling session with a dietitian along with monthly weigh-ins, or the same program plus the deposit contract.
The contract involved depositing up to $3 per day in an account that the researchers matched dollar-for-dollar. Any participant who achieved their weight-loss goal of up to one pound per week would collect a cash reward. The money was forfeited if they failed to meet their goal.
John said part of the reasoning behind such a program is that people respond more eagerly to the immediate fear of losing money than to the distant threat of weight-related health issues. There’s also the principle of loss aversion, in which people place greater value on averting a loss than achieving a gain, she added.
Although the threat of losing money did seem to motivate people to lose more weight, only seven out of 66 participants actually met the study goal of losing one pound per week over the first 24 weeks.
Indeed, nine months after the weight-loss program ended, the average weight loss in the financial-incentive group was just one pound below the average initial weight.
John hypothesized that perhaps such financial incentives have to continue, or be varied in some way, over the long haul to maintain weight loss results.
Such long-term financial incentives might someday be offered by insurance plans, she said.
"Obesity is hugely costly to insurance companies, so they have financial incentives to look at this."
Some insurance companies and large employers are already offering different types of incentives to get people to undergo health screenings or engage in healthy habits such as exercise.
John said she is "cautiously optimistic" that such incentives might help people shed pounds.
"I think we still need to show that the weight loss can be maintained,” she said.
The study was published online January 20, 2011 in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.Â
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