Lose Weight by Gambling Away Your Gut

(MoneyWatch) 

In southeastern Pennsylvania, where I grew up, they took the once-proud Bethlehem Steel and made it into a casino. Table games went live there recently and, given the crowd that turned out, you would have thought they were giving away money.

Opportunities to gamble are everywhere these days. There are local casinos like the one in Bethlehem, plus off-track betting, online poker, state-run lotteries, and enough church bingo and raffles to keep the rosary societies praying fervently. Despite the economy, people just can't seem to get enough of it. (Even MoneyWatch blogger Dan Kadlec sees benefits to low-stakes poker.)

So given how fat we've become as a nation and how that's contributing to the crippling cost of healthcare, maybe it's time to roll the dice and start gambling on weight loss. Don't laugh. I was reading my wife's Good Housekeeping the other night (I said don't laugh) when I ran across a study that found "dieters who stood to lose money if they didn't succeed in shedding weight were about five times as likely to reach their goal as those with no financial stake in the outcome." (A recent Newsweek blog by Kate Dailey summarized how financial incentives are also being used to change the behavior of everyone from HIV-prone women in South Africa to cocaine addicts. In addition, many companies are either considering or already using monetary rewards programs to promote employee health.)

Although I've never personally bet on my belly, it makes sense. The motivation to win at weight loss and pocket some cash seems compelling and exciting. Less jiggle and more jingle, if you will.

Indeed, there are a number of websites that focus on facilitating exactly that. Fatbet.net (with the motto "you bet your ass"), makemoneylosingweight.com ("bet your mass off"), and stickk.com ("put a contract out on yourself") all help you and your portly friends and family members bet on how many pounds you'll lose. These are not Caribbean-based gambling sites that take a cut of your ante, however. And no one named Knuckles will come knocking if you can't pay up. Rather, they simply help groups of people organize, record, and track the competition in varying ways. You can bet cash or devise more creative incentives to humiliate the losers.

I think this is a great trend, and I hope to see lots more applications of gambling to health. How about a cholesterol index, for example, where a real-time ticker tracks your total lipids while buddies either invest in your health long term or sell short? The same approach could work with blood sugar.

Hey, if the threat of death isn't enough to make us healthy, maybe good old-fashioned gambling can.