Social dieting is an exciting new phenomenon that harnesses the findings of new scientific research and the logic of common sense. It works like this: if I want to lose weight, and a friend of mine wants to lose weight, why don’t we join forces and try to slim down together? But imagine if your friend has a friend, or a co-worker, or a spouse, who also wants to lose weight. And then remember that you know a few people at the office who want to shed some pounds. Now, what if you got all of these friends and acquaintances together and connected them via a social media platform that integrates the power of technology and the support of a human network? That’s what social dieting is all about. It’s a group of people that want to lose weight by utilizing the unique potential of online social networks.
Dr. Nicholas Christakis, MD, PhD at Harvard Medical School has suggested that healthy behaviors can spread virally through social networks. “Network phenomena might be exploited to spread positive health behaviors,” he says in his seminal paper on obesity and social networks. “People are connected, and so their health is connected.” This is the social dimension of weight loss that DietBet aims to encapsulate. Human beings affect each other’s behavior in a multitude of ways, and DietBet aims to utilize the natural benefits of social networks to get people to lose more weight.
DietBet wants to harness the power our social networks and the incentives of financial rewards to create a wide-ranging network of healthy users who can lose weight while having fun at the same time. Whether it be Los Angeles or Laos, Denmark or Canada, our inclusive social system of dieting and our decentralized online platform ensure that DietBets can and will take place all over the world. DietBet is at the forefront of the social dieting revolution, and we hope you will join our network to make the world a healthier place.