Dietbetting in the News

DietBet Is Betting That Losing Weight Is About To Get More Social

"On June 15th, 2008 I got married. Five years and 30+ pounds later I am always on the lookout for a way to get back into my pre-marriage shape. I’ve picked up Soulcycle (which I highly recommend), joined soccer, basketball and softball leagues and a variety of other methods. Although I feel I am on the right track, I needed a little more public incentive to get the process going. And that’s when I discovered a startup called DietBet, an internet-based social dieting company."

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Get healthy and make some dough

"According to Tamara Grand, BCRPA-certified personal training, advanced group fitness leader and the author offitknitchick.com, people are simply searching for the support they need, and these challenges provide it. 'The challenges motivate and keep people accountable to their goals,” says Grand, who just hosted her second DietBet challenge."

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Trying to lose weight? DietBet puts your money where your cake-hole is

"I haven't tried DietBet myself -- but I'm about to...I'm only looking to lose about 10 pounds, but I'm really fired up about this. And I think the more people who join, the more fun it will be. For what it's worth, I'm donating 50 percent of whatever money I win (and I will be among the winners, thank you) to Mothers Against Drunk Driving. If you want to support a charity as well, you can update your DietBet profile accordingly."

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Dieting for dollars: Financial incentive helps people lose weight, study shows

"A study from the Mayo Clinic found that dieters offered a financial incentive were more likely to lose weight...TODAY contributor Dr. Roshini Raj was impressed with the results. 'As human beings, our brains really respond to rewards,' she said. 'Unfortunately, you would think being healthier, having a reduced risk of heart disease and cancer is the reward itself, but that's a long term thing. Money, you feel it in your pocket and you like it.'

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Dieting for Dollars: A Win for Both Trainers and Clients

"I've not only gained new clients, especially since people invite their friends to join them in my DietBets, I'm also maintaining my current client base, which is what any personal trainer wants'—that she's now contemplating running a DietBet to coincide with each 'diet season,' roughly five a year. Another benefit? 'Doing these bets expands your ability to create an international or global brand,' she says."

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Putting Cash on the Line to Lose Weight

"DietBet users can go on the website and join a public group, or create their own private game among family members or friends. The amount of money needed to wager is set by the person who starts the game. There are many public games that charge as little as $25. The goal is to lose 4 percent of your body weight in four weeks."

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Office Weight-Loss Contests Rise, Saboteurs and All

"Four-week games organized by New York-based DietBet, have been run at more than 500 companies, allotting cash prizes to any participant who sheds 4% of body weight. Chief executive Jamie Rosen says 90% of players slim down, averaging a 5.4-pound loss. Other employers run ad hoc contests, usually modeled after NBC-TV's winner-take-all 'Biggest Loser' series."

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Wagers help motivate weight-loss goals

"It's a great accountability system,' says personal trainer Tony Pino, who work at Platinum Gym in Sanford.

Now that he knows about DietBet, he says he's going to encourage his clients to use it.

'When you have something to shoot for and then you have a group of other people shooting for the same goal or heading in the same direction, that gets momentum,' Pino said."

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New apps offer smartphone support on losing weight and sticking to exercise programs

"This social dieting game puts your money where your mouth is. Create a game with friends, set the bet amount, and the first person to lose 4% of their starting weight wins the pot. The more people who play, the bigger the pay. You can also join in existing games."

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Gamble your way to weight loss with new apps

"New websites and apps known as weight loss wager programs are encouraging dieters to gamble their way to a leaner figure, betting on whether they can shed unwanted pounds. TODAY's Erica Hill reports and Jamie Rosen of DietBet.com shows how the program changed the lives of five employees."

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The Best Health And Fitness Apps And Gadgets For Your New Year's Needs

"DietBet offer[s] a social dieting platform that asks users to make a financial commitment (i.e. put up cash) to encourage themselves and their friends to hit their weight loss targets. Users create teams that compete against each other, with the first person to lose four percent of their starting weight getting the pot (or total money pledged). DietBet verifies weight loss through photos and algorithmic auditing."

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Free Apps for New Year's Resolutions

"DietBet.com wants to help you make money while dieting. You can set up a challenge of your own or join another group. The competition lasts four weeks and the person who loses 4% of their bodyweight during that time wins. Celebrity trainers, gyms, HR managers, charities and others already have challenges set up on the site. DietBet is available for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad."

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9 Apps to Fast-Track Your New Year's Resolutions

"We've compiled a list of apps that can help you accomplish all sorts of goals this year. Check it out and let us know if we missed any that you plan on using in 2013."

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Tim Ferriss attempts to do what hundreds of years of psychological research couldn't

"Ahead of his latest book launch "The 4-Hour Chef," Ferris is hoping to get to the bottom of why people fall off the wagon with their diets, and figure out how to keep them on track. His first step was to put all participants on the same low carb diet and exercise program. [T]wo groups are using online tools that claim to help people create goals and stick with them in different ways that hold them more accountable and then offer them rewards for their success."

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Need some financial incentive to motivate your weight loss?

"DietBet is a four-week weight-loss game with major perks!

Join an existing game or start your own. Then place your wager, big or small -- the more people involved, the bigger the prize! And everyone who loses 4 percent of their body weight gets a share of the pot at the end."

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How to Use Money As Running Motivation

"Having a financial incentive to lose weight could make you five times more likely to succeed, according to a study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association in 2008, which may explain the recent success of 'social dieting' Web sites that let you bet on yourself. When you lose the weight, you win the money–a classic win/win. 'Nobody likes dieting, but everyone likes games,' says Jamie Rosen, the New York City marathoner who founded dietbet.com, where you win a share of the "pot" when you achieve a weight-loss goal in an online competition."

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The 4-Hour Body Million-Pound March (and $1,000,000 Pot)

"When you diet alone, nobody's holding your feet to the fire. There's nothing stopping you from saying, "I'll do it next month." But when you compete with others, especially with money on the line, it focuses you on a goal like nothing else. It's strict accountability wrapped in a game."

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Social Dieting

BET YOUR BOTTOM

"Starting a diet can feel about as enjoyable as enduring a root canal. But now there's a service that seeks to turn the process into a good-natured game, replete with rules, winners and cash prizes.

Essentially a tech-savvy version of the age-old weight-loss competition (or, you know, The Biggest Loser), the new website DietBet facilitates one-month "games" between friends to see who can drop the most excess baggage.

It's up to the organizer of each competition to invite participants and determine how much money is at stake; you can bet nothing, though recent studies show that money might be the most persuasive motivator. Once everybody is ready to go, contestants enter a starting weight (don't worry, the actual number is hidden from your pals) along with a telling "before" picture.

At the end of the four-week period, dieters submit their final "after" shots and weigh-in numbers (to be reviewed by DietBet employees to weed out cheaters), and anyone who has lost at least 4 percent of their body weight wins or splits the pot.

DietBet discourages dangerous behavior by disqualifying people who lose more than triple their goal, and of course a general air of sportsmanship is expected.

After all, nobody likes a sore loser."

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Fit Fight: Challenge Friends to Lose Weight with DietBet

"The idea is called The Fun Theory and it's what inspired the creation of DietBet, a site that turns losing weight into a game amongst friends.

Participants ante up via PayPal or credit card. After the initial weigh-in, competitors have 28 days to reach their target weight. The winner gets the pot; if multiple players succeed, the pot is split amongst them.

The official rules keep players honest and safe (you can be disqualified for losing too much weight). And while the game is afoot, you can talk smack, devise a strategy, and add photographic evidence to prove your dominance.

At the end, you'll have lost weight and had fun doing it — not just in theory."

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Wagering on Weight Loss: Diet Bet Websites

"Blogger Amy Oztan decided it was time to kick her diet into higher gear. She turned to dietbet.com, a new website that lets you wager on future weight loss. Although she'd previously managed to shed 18 lbs. on her own, Oztan figured that she'd be spurred on by the combined threat of online humiliation if she failed, plus the thrill of prize money if she succeeded."

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Would you lose weight if money were at stake?

"You might want to lose weight, but the noticeable benefits seem so far off in the future that you continually procrastinate. You need a reason to get more fit right now - how about money? A new study in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine reinforces this idea that if money were on the line, you might start on a healthier path.

In fact, there's other evidence to suggest that money does matter. A 2008 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that financial incentives did get people to lose weight.

You can find websites that offer rewards for healthy behaviors. Others offer you the opportunity to punish yourself financially if you don't meet your goals (that may sound harsh, but it's a motivator):

DietBet.com: This website lets you join with other people in betting on weight loss. You sign up with at least one other person and get 28 days to lose weight. If there's only one winner, he or she wins the entire prize pot. Multiple winners get equal shares of the pot."

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Scale Wages: Taking Bets and Dropping Pounds

"Testing the outer limits of your willpower is DietBet, a website that combines healthy old-fashioned weight loss with a healthy old-fashioned gambling competition… the Kentucky Derby of dieting."

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Website Places Healthy Wager On Weight Loss

"This website gives people accountability", Glassman says. "It gives them support and also there's the real hard-core goal of it all, the competition aspect. And the goal is actually pretty reasonable."

In all, the pro-eaters competing on dietbet.com lost 79 pounds and walked away with about $200 in winnings each. They plan to keep the challenge going by upping the ante instead of their waistlines.

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The Verdict On... Dieting For Dollars

"We know from watching The Biggest Loser that winning $250,000 can be a huge motivator. But can the fear of losing money have the same effect? New sites like DietBet.com... are, well, betting on it. Though the rules vary by site, the basic idea is the same: You wager money – say; $50 or $100 – that you'll reach your goal weight. If you do, you get back your dollars and potentially win more money. If you don't, you kiss your bucks good-bye. Experts say the premise has merit: In a recent study, people with a financial incentive to slim down lost about seven times more weight than those who had no money on the line. And if a diet betting site "motivates you to make healthy eating changes you can maintain after the competitions ends, even better," says Elisa Zied, R.D., author of Nutrition at Your Fingertips."

OUR RULING: Play your cards right and this gamble can pay off !

FAT CHANCE! Now you can win money by dropping a few pounds

"Want to fatten your wallet and lose weight? New websites let you bet that you'll meet your goals – and earn money when you succeed.

DietBet.com lets you bet against your pals: Those who reach their target weights by the last weigh-in win money...

In general, people lose more weight when there is money on the line, a recent analysis of research from Cornell University found. Take Nat Walker, 50, who recently competed with a group on DietBet.com. He lost more than 10 pounds and won his challenge. "The financial incentive was there," says the project manager from Burlington, Connecticut. "It gave me an absolute goal of where I needed to be in28 days, and it was extremely motivating."

Is Weight Loss Contagious?

"Diet bets have become a hot trend online, in gyms, and as informal wagers between friends—and they work. One study found that dieters who stood to lose money if they didn't shed weight were five times more likely to reach their weight-loss goal than those with no financial stake. Half of the bettors shed 16 pounds in 16 weeks, versus only 10.5 percent of the non-bettors.

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DietBet Contestants Eat 32-inch Pizza for Weight Loss

"32-inch pizza, 3 minutes to spare, and a lot of beverages, the "Last Supper" was a definite eating contest.

These eaters are the most competitive people out there -- you give them a competition, even if it's dieting, they'll do it!" Jamie Rosen, DietBet founder said. "Our business is about having fun while losing weight. These guys were totally up for it."

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Got Goals But Lack Discipline? Now You Can Buy It Online

"Quitters and daydreamers, take heart! New web services don't just help keep you focused on your goals. They pay you to stick to them, and they pick your pocket if you don't. Result: You feel more committed to your ambitions, users say, and the odds that you'll achieve them rise.

Other sites have a more narrow focus. Dietbet and HealthyWage, for example, are specific to people wanting to lose weight."

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Diet Bet: All Pro Eaters Enter Pizza-Eating, Weight-Loss Competitions

"It's the ultimate challenge for competitive eaters everywhere: don't eat."

Six "All Pro Eaters" vowed to go on a one-month diet on Friday, in an unusual competition that pits once-weighty gorgers against their own fat for a chance at $1,000. Whoever loses four percent of their weight over that month splits the pot.

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Stay Motivated and Diet For Dollars

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Think You Can't Lose Weight? Wanna Bet?

 "DietBet is the newest site to allow users to bet on their weight loss. The goal is to make dieting a game, according to founder Jamie Rosen.

Mom blogger Amy Oztan started a DietBet with a few other bloggers earlier this month, and has lost almost 9 pounds. "There were so many times when I wanted to just say screw it, but I didn't want to be the loser," she says."

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Losin' It: Taking It Off For Charity

"The DietBet website turns dieting into a fun competition. And by "fun" I mean "lets you risk losing a pile of money to ensure that you lose weight." DietBet put up $5,000 dollars that I, the Dilettantes, and five other bloggers were all competing to win.

And if we were successful at losing 4% of our body weight in one month, the winners (losers) would share the pot and a percentage of the winnings with a charity of our choice. We all selected DC Central Kitchen because we love what they do, and it somehow seemed perfect we were eating less so others could eat more.

Anyway, after all of this, it all came down to our weigh-in last night. And true to our freakishly competitive form, we were all successful at losing at least 4% of our body weight. And because I'm on a roll, I'm going to continue with my healthy habits to get back to my fighting weight."

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Gaining by losing weight: the best ways to lose weight

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Dieting for dollars

That social accountability is the basis for DietBet, a weight-loss-wager website that launched Dec. 19…DietBet founder Jamie Rosen says users can send messages encouraging one another and track progress through an online scoreboard.

"It becomes this fun social experience that's the opposite of what people think of dieting," he says. "It's not lonely or solitary."

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Diet betting websites help losers win

DietBet.com is the latest site on the scene with the motto of "Lose weight with friends while taking their money." It launched in December and already has hundreds of people signed up in various contests.

"Ours is not winner-take-all like 'The Biggest Loser' show," said founder Jamie Rosen. "Anyone who reaches their goal at the end of a four-week challenge splits the pot. It doesn't matter who crosses the finish line first. We're not making this like a gambling pool, but actually trying to help people lose weight."

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DietBet allows you and friends to wager on your weight loss

Enter DietBet, a new social media game and website where people compete to see who can lose a given amount of weight in a four-week period with a cash prize as their reward.

"We think it's a tool for dieters to get motivated and have fun," said Tina Basle, vice president of strategic alliances at DietBet. "People are keen to get fit and lose weight and keen to engage socially with one another."

"No one is going to put their kid through college using DietBet, the main focus is on dieting," Basle said. "If you're a gambler, go to Vegas."

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Money: The Root Of All Resolve

While it seems extreme and a little faddish, a popular way of dieting sweeping the internet is by registering on a betting site such as DietBet and FatBet and competing against your friends over who will get to the target weight first in a set amount of time. Money is involved, which is always a good motivator.

In fact, a 2008 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that those in a weight-loss incentive group (where a cash deposit was added) were not only more likely to lose weight they were also more likely to keep the weight off - after seven months those in the incentive groups weighed substantially less than they did at the start of the study, while the control group did not.

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Free help available with New Year's fitness resolutions

For anyone who has made a New Year's resolution to lose weight or simply wants to improve their health in 2012 free help is available… But weight loss doesn't have to be all work. According to Jaime Rosen, founder of the website Dietbet.com, it can be fun when turned into a friendly competition.

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Making a Resolution? Diet Betting May Offer Incentive to Lose Weight

You have only days until you start your New Year's resolutions, and we're going to bet a lot of you have resolved to slim down in 2012 ... A new kid on the block is DietBet, which offers to host your challenges ...

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Win Money and Lose Weight?

Money may not be able to buy you love, but it turns out it can help with weight loss.

Research has shown that, when it comes to dropping excess pounds, there's nothing like cold, hard cash to keep you motivated. In fact, dieters who have a financial incentive to lose weight are nearly five times more likely to make it happen than those with no incentive.

Inspired by the statistics, there have been a new wave of websites that offer monetary rewards for weight loss. The latest to jump on the lose-to-win bandwagon is DietBet—the online social dieting game, which launches mid-December, that lets players win money through weight-loss competitions. People place wagers on reaching a healthy goal weight and everyone who achieves the goal wins a share of the pot. It's like fantasy football for dieters.

Founder Jamie Rosen came up with the concept after witnessing the painstaking process friends went through to plan their own diet bets and deciding to streamline the process with an online source. "We wanted to make that all a million times easier for the game's organizer and also more fun," says Rosen.

Dietbet also offers innovative features, such as the Daily Carrot—a motivational and amusing daily tip written by comedy writers from Harvard Lampoon—and a message board, where users can trash talk, share photos and keep up with each other's scores. "The reason we started DietBet was the observation that nobody in the world likes to lose weight but everyone loves playing games," explains Rosen. "So we put a lot of attention to making it a fun, social game experience."

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Betting Against the Bulge

The financial incentive is one thing, of course, but what seems to supercharge the effectiveness of the method is an element of public competition -- the bigger, the better -- between friends or between foes, with the latter scenario perhaps being the more motivating one. "When you go public and make a big to-do about something you are planning to do, like lose weight, a lot of people know about it, and the stakes get raised," says Jamie Rosen, a founder of MakeMoneyLosingWeight.com. "In addition to there being money involved, just the fact that there is humiliation at risk is also compelling." The desire to win -- or at least not lose -- any amount of cash, combined with the dread of losing face, can lead to some stiff competition and mind games. Rosen says he's heard about offices where workers competing for a cash prize for the person who loses the most weight will do push-ups in front of one another's desks and surreptitiously leave chocolates around, hoping to break their adversaries.

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Eat This Cake And Face a £200 Fine

makemoneylosingweight.com [is] designed for communities of dieters who want to challenge one another. A group of friends or colleagues sign up, everyone puts a set amount into a pot and makes a commitment to lose a certain amount of weight. After a pre-arranged period of time, whoever is closest to his or her target weight takes the pot. The websites provide a forum for publicly tracking weight.

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Wager on losing weight? A Bet Where You Can Win and Lose (Video & Print)

A recent study by the University of Pennsylvania and the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Philadelphia confirmed "cha-ching," with an element of risk, can be a strong motivator for losing weight.

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Getting Paid To Lose Weight Or Quit Smoking

A study in the December issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association found that people who had financial incentives to lose weight were much more successful at dieting than those who did not … An increasing number of dieters are entering formal wagers with friends or co-workers to bet on weight loss goals.

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Dieting? Put Your Money Where Your Fat Is

It was an eight-player example of a diet bet, in which those seeking to lose pounds give themselves a new incentive: money. If they don't lose more weight than the competition, they lose cash. Internet sites that facilitate diet betting have seen an increase in traffic, and recent studies have supported what Mr. Ee and his co-workers discovered: diet bets work for many people who couldn't seem to shed pounds any other way.

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