Diet bet / Step bet

apolyton · June 23, 2016, 8:03pm

If you’re looking for some additional financial motivators for fitness , here are two options

Step bet : a game running for 6 weeks, each person bets $50. During each of the 6 weeks you need to have 4 “active days” and 2 "stretch days"
Each person has a personalised goal based on his recent history from a Fitbit or iOS/Android phone
From my numbers, active days are about 10% higher than my average and stretch days about 30% higher

Diet Bet : there are various games , short ones (4 weeks) and longer ones (6 months). On the long one that I joined the goal is to lose 10% of your weight.
Weight is confirmed via photos by humans. The game is separated in monthly rounds, with gradual milestones (3%, 6%, 8%, 9%, 10%, 10%) each month betting 25$ (you can drop out and not continue for the entire 6 months)

chelsea · June 30, 2016, 2:09am

thank you for sharing this - it fits so perfectly with my Ideal Motivation for Really Hard Things i finally realized a few months back!!

i totally joined the stepbet that started monday & i am now 10% of the way through it. and now i’m posting here as extra self-motivation to not give up, because then i will have to admit failure here

apolyton · July 5, 2016, 10:02am

The extra steps that the Stepbet app adds as your goals (on top of your average history) seem a bit hard. In my game it seems like a lot of people are failing from week 1 already! But it’s worth it i think

drtall · July 5, 2016, 7:34pm

I’m psyched up for Stepbet!

It does seem like you ought to game it by sandbagging your Fitbit stats before enrolling to make the “challenge” easy for you. But that strategy isn’t stable of course (once most of the entrants are cheaters there’s not going to be much money to split among them).

In any case, I’m giving it a shot (not cheating). I suspect, though, one wouldn’t be able to use it long-term because increasing your fitbit averages by playing once will inflate the challenge for the next game, etc. until it becomes impossible.

apolyton · July 5, 2016, 8:45pm

Not many people will have the patience to walk less for a week in order to get lower goals and then join the game. Too much planning

chelsea · July 6, 2016, 2:37am

my goals are soooo low (9k/12k), partially because i am (was?) embarrassingly inactive, but also because i didn’t go everywhere with my phone attached to my hip like i am now. if my goals were in the 15k+ range like i see other people’s… not so sure i’d even be able to do this, time-wise!

@drtall that’s a good observation – extra motivation to make this one supereffective!

drtall · July 6, 2016, 2:37am

Haha I got you beat, my goal is 8k/12k

apolyton · July 6, 2016, 4:21am

This will probably scare you

grayson · July 7, 2016, 7:19am

You guys are killing me…I’m delighted when I get, like, 6K steps a day.

(Not doing StepBet (yet), ftr.)

chelsea · July 10, 2016, 6:12am

note to self: do not take the free day before sunday again… casts a bit of a pall over the weekend

drtall · January 10, 2021, 8:02pm

[sad frog gif]

apolyton · July 12, 2016, 7:05pm

Maybe you need to get moving?

apolyton · July 12, 2016, 7:06pm

Status update

grayson · July 13, 2016, 9:05am

Still not doing StepBet, but you guys are motivating me. I’ve started taking 75-minute brisk walks every day (since Friday) and haven’t gotten fewer than 10k steps a day since. On Monday I even broke 20k! My 7-day moving average has more than doubled, to 11.5k.

chelsea · July 19, 2016, 1:38am

thoughts on week 4 day 1:

it takes me 60min+ to keep up with my goal every day.
that is a significant chunk of time, after work/sleep/necessary daily routines.
the obvious solution is to ‘insert more activity throughout your day!’ which my job is not exactly conducive to. or perhaps just my productivity at my job is not conducive to it.
it’s hot as where i live. maybe this is more of a fall/winter activity for holiday weight.
at this point i kind of resent it every day, vs. being glad i signed up and am being active… i’m not really relaxed until my steps are done which is usually 8pm at the earliest. not enough night downtime!!!
regardless, i have kept going for 3wks so far, and i was reeeeeeal close to giving in a few times. (those are the days when i have to drive to a popular pokemon go location, so there is something to keep my mind occupied while i roast in the sun for an hour. pokemon go is actually pretty effective for this.)

i might try out a dietbet when this one is up… stepbet is a good starter, because i am always directly responsible for succeeding or failing (outcomes vs. activities anybody??), but ultimately you can’t outrun a poor diet probably more effective to put your money where your mouth is…

literally

sorry everyone

drtall · July 19, 2016, 4:04am

I’m on week 3[1] day 1 here and I feel sort of fortunate that I am able to meet the easier goal just by walking to work. It’s a 30m walk but it’s also a 30m drive so it doesn’t even take any extra time to walk it. On the stretch goal days I need to do something else so that was a bit of a scramble last week.

So far I’m enjoying it though!

[1] They call it week 3 but the first week didn’t count so it really is week 2 for me. I didn’t try at all on week 1.

apolyton · July 19, 2016, 5:55am

Try spreading the amount of walk through the day. Take more breaks. Combine it with other tasks. Answer e-mails or make phone calls while walking around.
I’m doing my daily reading and duolingo while walking around in my apartment :3

chelsea · July 20, 2016, 3:55am

oh, and kind of an important factor i did not mention:

it looks like enough people will survive the game, so nobody will make money (except stepbet, maybe), we’ll just get our $50 back. which is nice, yay, good job everybody on meeting your goals… but lame.

the dietbet might be more fun in that respect, because the outcomes-activities dilemma means more people might fail, giving you a better chance for $weet profit$ (if you do not also fall victim to it!!!).

apolyton · July 20, 2016, 4:53am

My game is on week 5 of 6. 504 remain from 638, but around 50 drop each round. So around 400 will win. It won’t be a huge profit either.

drtall · August 15, 2016, 11:07pm

Wahoo I survived my first stepbet game!

I was struggling to find the motivation to walk more, but it turns out an easy way to get my steps in is to walk to work. So can you guess when I started stepbet: