You know the little star stickers we used to get on our charts in pre-school? Maybe it was for completing a task like tying our shoes or writing our name. Didn’t it feel good to get those stickers? What about when you got older? Anyone ever do the “Book It!” program? Reading books equaled free Pizza Hut pizza and it was worth every minute of sounding out those words.
There were lots of incentives to press through challenges when we were younger, but not so much as we age. But just because we’re older doesn’t mean our reaction to reward has changed. Health Rally knows this and has created an inspiring program for achieving health goals with the dangling carrot of reward as the incentive.
Zach Lynch founded Health Rally, an online support network, based on a pretty amazing statistic. According to a study in the journal American Medical Association, dieters with a financial incentive to lose weight were almost five times more likely to lose weight than those with no reward incentive. Furthermore, participants in this study who received financial rewards lost more than 13 pounds in 16 weeks, compared to an average loss of only 3.9 pounds in the control group.
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