Healthful Bites

Weighty Wager

Gambling on cards, horses or football…that you’ve heard of. But weight loss? Yes, there are actually several online tools that help you stay accountable to yourself and others by putting money on it.

Health experts have known for quite some time that sharing your goals with others increases success because of the added accountability and support—so that’s where the “broadcasting your weight loss goals” comes in. And the money? Well, it seems that feeling good and improving health may not be enough of an incentive for some looking to drop a few pounds.

Workplaces have been incentivizing weight loss for years: the thinking being that a healthier employee reduces absenteeism and insurance costs. Now this idea is available on a personal level.

Two sites in particular are mentioned in a TIME magazine article about the concept: Healthywage and StickK. A person who wants to lose weight sets a goal for his or herself, picks a “wager,” possibly with a referee moderator to confirm the truthfulness of results, and signs a contract of sorts. Users can invite friends and family members to check in on progress throughout the bet, hopefully increasing success through peer pressure.

Interestingly, if you miss your goal, the funds that have been anteed up can be surrendered to an “anti-charity” (for example, this might entail a donation to another political party) through some of these programs or they may just take the money to continue the Web site’s mission.

Do you agree with the concept of making weight loss a “higher stakes” (well at least mentally for some) affair? Would you be interested in betting on yourself to achieve a health goal?

(Image from Infoniac)

Slow Your Roll

Scientists are trying to combat speed eating early in people’s lives, hoping to foster healthy eating behaviors and habits in childhood (which can then last a lifetime). But rather than keeping tabs on the subject’s weight, the researchers measured plate weight. More than one hundred children tracked their eating speeds by eating their meals on a plate which sits on a scale for a study published in the British Medical Journal.

After one year of eating with the food scale (treatment group) or with a plate on a table (control group), the children with the scales ate at a slower pace and weighed less than their peers. In fact, by the end of the study, the scale eaters ate 11 percent slower than their baseline rates.

How fast food disappeared from the plate—or how quickly the plate content’s weight diminished—was graphed. A food therapist created an ideal eating speed graph, which was compared with the subjects graph. These images are compared instantaneously and if the subject is eating too quickly, the electronic scale “tells” them so.

Becoming a more mindful eater helps many people feel fuller with less food or become better at recognizing when they are full so they don’t eat past their full point. After a follow-up, the slower dining results from this experiment seemed to last for at least six months post-scale meals.

While it’s not practical for all humans, or children, to mount scales in their dinner tables, these findings exhibit the power of being more mindful at meals.

Do you consider yourself a fast eater? If so, is this problematic or you or does it work out fine?

(I don’t even want to know how many pounds of hot dogs a speed eater consumes in minutes at the Nathan’s Fourth of July Hot Dog Eating Contest!)

Water cooler conversation starter: Beautifulpeople.com, a dating Web site, recently kicked off 5,000 members for putting on pounds over the holidays. The site founder said that he didn’t want “fatties roam the site.” Whoa. Who defines what is “beautiful?”