A four-week dietbet won’t turn your life around by itself, but it will kick your butt into high gear, and it’s with small progress that sustainable changes take root. The legendary football coach Vince Lombardi used to say “inches make champions.” He’d have been a great dietbetting coach.
Just try it. You won’t believe how a friendly competition and financial incentives will supercharge your motivation. You’ll start exercising. You’ll pass on seconds. You’ll take the stairs. Then you’ll drop a size or two and start to feel energetic. People will find you sexy. You’ll talk a little smack on the message boards. A little positive feedback is all that most of us need to reboot our habits, especially if you’re doing it with the people around you, like your friends, family, and co-workers.
DietBet’s job is to supply the motivation, support network, and game structure. Though we may recommend books, healthy recipes, and sound weight loss approaches, we leave it up to you to lose weight however you want. DietBet is not a dieting program and there are no pills, shakes, or ab exercisers to buy.
Dietbets last just four weeks because we think it’s important to get quick wins. Most weight-loss plans take months. But with a goal so far over the horizon, it can start to feel like a death march. We want you to have triumphant moments, an excuse to prance around and blow your dietbet winnings on a massage. When’s the last time you actually felt victorious at the end of a diet? With DietBet, you will.
If you need to lose more than one month’s worth of weight, we suggest you play repeatedly until you get to a healthy weight. After that, do maintenance dietbets as needed.
Although the game is short by design, we do not condone quick-fix solutions or bogus products that we wouldn’t use ourselves. In our Daily Carrot newsletter, we’ll introduce you to cool gadgets and clever products that can change the way you eat and exercise over the long run.
To avoid abuse of DietBet, we made the game so that nobody gets extra credit for losing weight the fastest, or for exceeding their goal. This isn’t a reality show where you have to lose 200 pounds or get booted off. In fact, dietbets are the opposite. In the end, they’re a 4-week race against the scale that everyone can win. Indeed, the best dietbets are often the least dramatic—the ones where you just win back your money because everyone in the game reached their goal.