You can’t even pay people to lose weight
“MONEY MOTIVATES PEOPLE TO SLIM DOWN” blared the headlines after a 2007 study indicated that financial workplace incentives encouraged employees to lose weight and more of it. That study, authored by RTI International and researchers at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, concluded that of the 200 overweight employees who participated in the experiment, those who were paid the most amount of money lost more weight than those who were paid less or not at all. Obesity experts cheerleaded the study’s findings as a way to encourage more employers to dangle financial carrots in encouraging employee weight-loss and businesses have followed suit. Even the federal government is now getting into the game. Congress is currently seriously considering proposals that would provide tax breaks and other incentives to companies who financially reward employees to lose weight and/or penalize fat employees who don’t. The fact that companies might just simply fire and not hire employees who don’t meet “healthy” weight standards doesn’t seem to be of much concern to the proposal’s backers.
In the never-ending phenomenon otherwise known as the “obesity paradox,” a new study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research finds just the opposite: losing weight is so hard you cannot even pay people to do it. This study included 2,407 overweight and obese people enrolled in weight-loss schemes at their workplace and divided them into three groups: Group A was offered $60 to maintain a weight loss of 5 percent; those in Group B paid $100 with the understanding that the money would be returned upon losing 5 percent of their weight with bonuses for more pounds shed; and Group C, a control group, was offered only $20 as a reward for just staying in the program for one year. The results?
The group that was offered $60 lost an average of just 1.4 pounds, while the controls lost 1.8. Those who made the $100 deposit dropped an average of 1.9 pounds more than the controls, but, the authors write, people motivated enough to risk their own money would most likely have lost weight with any program.
…One of the authors, John Cawley, an economist at Cornell, said that while money was ineffective in these cases, there is surely some amount of money that would persuade most people to lose weight. But no one knows what that amount is.
Studies about weight are endlessly contradicting with the conclusions reached often dependent on the sources funding them, so the discrepancies in the two studies aren’t surprising. I don’t know the financial backers of either of these studies, but the money trail aside, it’s interesting to note the length of time in which participants were evaluated in each study. In the 2007 study — which found financial incentives to be effective in encouraging weight-loss — employees were evaluated after just three months. In the second and more exhaustive study, employees had to maintain a weight loss of 5 percent for at least one year before they qualified for any financial incentives. It’s little wonder that the first study was so “successful.” As studies show, diets do lead to short-term weight loss, but these losses are often not sustainable or maintained. The second study gives a much more accurate picture at the ways in which financial weight-loss incentive programs fail in the long run. In fact, the second study not only indicates the ineffectiveness of bribing employees to lose weight, it also suggests that these promotions might actually be counterproductive by encouraging employees to crash diet, which has been shown to be far more dangerous and unhealthy than being fat itself. So, in effect, companies trying to save money on health care costs by compelling employees to lose weight might actually be driving up costs instead.
The second study is not without its flaws — its authors acknowledge that theirs isn’t a randomized, controlled experiment. Most salient, however, is the assumption researchers seem to reach in that the reason for the dismal results is because employees simply were not “motivated” enough to lose weight and keep it off and that there exists some dollar figure or economic carrot that would see results. Perhaps the overwhelming failure of the experiment indicates that it’s not a matter of a lack of want in losing weight and keeping it it off as it is an inability to do so.
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