Lighten Your Load with Lose It or Lose It

Lose It or Lose It is an interesting service that helps you stay motivated in reaching your weight loss goals. You tell the site how much weight or money you want to lose each week and make an initial investment based on your selections. Each week, you check in with Lose It or Lose It to track your progress. If you fail to meet your weekly goal or fail to weigh-in entirely, you lose your money for that week. So, whether you reach your weight goals or not, you’re still going to lighten your load.

The first step is to choose how much weight you want to lose over your 10 week period, and how much money you’re willing to lose if you fail to lose the weight. As an example, we’ll take a 200lb person looking to lose 20lbs. Over 10 weeks, that’s 2lbs/week. We’ll also assume this person is willing to lose $10 per pound if they miss their weekly goal of 2lbs.

As you can see in the screenshot, this plan will cost $300 to start. There will be a $10 penalty for any skipped weigh-ins and a $20 penalty if you don’t lose your 2lbs for the week. The most important thing to remember here is that you get all your money back if you actually lose all the weight. Even if you only lose some of the weight, that still means you get some of your money back.

To help you out in your quest, Lose It or Lose It requires you to sign up two “accountability friends” to help in keeping you motivated and in reminding you about your weigh-ins. They will get emails 6hrs in advance to make sure you actually do your weigh-in and will also be notified if you start slipping. You can’t even start your plan until at least two people agree to be your accountability friends.

I think Lose It or Lose It has a genius revenue model going on here. Motivation is probably the primary reason as to why many of us fail to reach our fitness and health goals and money is a pretty huge motivator. They have taken the same revenue model that gyms use (charging you every month and hoping you don’t show up), but have flipped it into something that may actually help you succeed. The mental implications of making a monetary investment in yourself can be very powerful.

What do you think?