It’s getting to the point in the summer that maybe a few of those bbqs, beers & cocktails, parties and even desserts are starting to add up. It’s great to get together with others but watching your calories and getting some exercise are key elements to losing weight. However people have found online or through companies that promote to them via mail or social media options to earn cash or prizes by losing weight. It’s an incentive-based system– unlike other systems where you must buy their food or attend their meetings, this is a different motivation entirely. The question is are these things ethical, authentic and will they pay off in the end including in lost weight, increased fitness and actually getting the incentive offered. Here’s what David Roddenberry of Healthywage.com has to say about these incentive-based systems.
Red Flags for Pound Shedding Profit-Seekers
With multiple highly credible studies underscoring the effectiveness of employing financial incentives to motivate weight loss, including those cited in the Archives of Internal Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association, the marketplace has followed suit with various companies now offering the opportunity to “diet for dollars.” But, how can health-seekers discern if a Web site offering to pay for lost pounds is legit?
Heed this list of red flags that can indicate a weight loss company offering monetary rewards may not be on the up and up:
1) Lack of weight verifications.
If you are winning money or other prizes for losing weight expect your weight loss to be verified by a third party. If there is no such verification or audit process from a credible third party, rest assured there are problems with this program.2) Requires you to purchase a third party product.
Red flags should raise if the company requires you to purchase food, pills, clothing, or other products in order to earn your money for losing weight.3) Inaccessible service or support.
If you can’t reach someone quickly via telephone or email to answer questions about the program you should be cautious and perhaps investigate the company further to ensure they are an established business.4) Nonexistent social media following.
Verify the company has a presence on Facebook or Twitter. Ask a question via Facebook to fans of the company’s page and see what other program members say. Look to see if your own Facebook friends are friends of the company and, better, if they have actually won money for losing weight.5) Few or complete absence of search results. Since getting paid to lose weight is almost too good to be true, you should expect to readily find a notable number of press articles or other mentions about the program when searching on Google or other search engines. If there are less than 50,000 hits for the name of the company or its Web site you should keep looking around for a more established purveyor.
6) No coverage in popular media.
If a company has been covered in major national magazines and top-tier metro newspapers you can feel comfortable that the program is legitimate.
Thank you to David Roddenberry of Healthywage.com for some important points to be alert for if you are hunting down a weight loss program– whether in your “real life” or your “virtual life”. Be a smart consumer!!
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David Roddenberry is co-founder of HealthyWage, (www.HealthyWage.com), the only company that pays Americans cash to lose weight while offering social and expert-based support, tools and resources, and goal-setting and tracking technologies to address our nation’s obesity epidemic and improve America’s collective health.
Stevie Wilson,
LA-Story.com
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I haven’t checked in here for some time because I thought it was getting boring, but the last several posts are good quality so I guess I will add you back to my daily bloglist. You deserve it my friend 🙂