Womens Health

Money-Motivated Weight Loss

Most of us go out of the winter holiday season feeling as though we're wearing a Christmas feast on our fronts. We're all bloated and depressed with gaining so many pounds, even if it sure was fun eating all that good fancy food. But the winter doldrums does not exactly lend the right atmosphere for getting motivated to lose that extra weight. That makes it easy to say, "What's one more fast food meal? Big deal, so I'll have one last cheeseburger."

Packing Pounds

The problem is that this kind of thinking tends to go on and on without cessation, while you pack on the pounds, week by week, day by day, and then, Whoops! Bathing suit season is upon you. Some gyms are getting smart though, and are brainstorming new ways to motivate their clientele.

In Spartanburg, SC, for instance, the YMCA created a "Team Lean" competition. This is a ten week program offering cash incentives for weight loss. If you join up at the start of the program, you pay $60. Miss a weekly weigh-in? You'll pay $5. For every pound you gain, you dish out one buck.

The program is based on team work. Each team consists of four people. You pick three friends and sign up together to get the added incentive of supportive friends working together toward a common goal.

Winning Team

All the money that is collected is distributed to the winning team—the team that loses the most weight—as well as to an individual weight-loss winner.

In Spartanburg, team leader for Team Glamorous' Marlene Lyles is boasting, "Oh we gonna. We gonna win." 

The membership director of the Greater Spartanburg YMCA, Melissa Carson, is hopeful that cash prices will give the incentive participants need to lose weight. "We’ve done programs like this in the past that have been free for people to participate in, and they start off very excited, couple of weeks into it they kind of taper off and they lose all their oomph in it.  We have a feeling since they are investing time and money into it that they will really put for a good effort," says Lyles.

Cash Incentives

Cash incentives are nice, especially in this economy, but for some of the participants, the motivation is just about living longer, Sleek Sisters team member Launa Blackburn explains, "When a doctor says if you continue on this path, you are probably going to be become diabetic, something just clicks."

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