When I first heard of Healthywage, I immediately went and did as much research as possible about the company because it seemed really weird to me and I didn’t understand how it worked. Honestly, Healthywage kind of seemed like it was some sort of scam! However, after learning more about them I can tell you that it’s absolutely legit. In fact, I trust them so much so I just bet $600 on myself.
What is Healthywage? A little backstory
If you’re not familiar with Healthywage, they’re a company that lets you place a bet on your weight loss. They’ve probably got a pretty good business model going since, by and large, the majority of people don’t meet their weight loss goals. However, studies have found that placing a monetary incentive on weight loss does increase people’s chances of succeeding.
They’ve actually been around since 2009, although they have evolved a lot since then. They’ve been featured on all sorts of news outlets and TV shows like the Today Show, The Doctors, Fox News, CNN and NPR. You can even find a lot of people on YouTube sharing their Healthywage journey and rewards.
How it works is after you sign up, you can place a bet on yourself that you’ll lose a certain amount of weight in a set time frame. This is called a Healthywager. In addition to this, they also have lots of smaller challenges you can join that are 3 months each. You can do up to 10 smaller challenges at a time in addition to your Healthywager.
Healthywager
This is the main bet that you can place on yourself and where you can win the most money. The bet has to be placed for a minimum of 6 months, but you can set the time all the way up to 18 months. The amount of weight you want to lose is up to you, but your bet has to be over $100.
Your bet could be something small like $10 a month for 12 months that you’ll lose 30 lbs. Or, way bigger like $50 for 18 months that you’ll lose 100 lbs.
If you go to their website, you can play around with their calculator to see how much you could win. It’s based on how much you want to lose and how big of a bet you can place, as well as the likelihood you can achieve the goal based on the weight loss, your age, sex, etc.
However, playing with the calculator I found once you start betting a significant amount of money (like $200+/month) the less return on your investment you’ll get. You’ll still get a total bigger prize if you win, however since you had to bet so much money in the first place, you’re not gaining as much in the end.
Your reward might only be a 75% return on investment vs. 240% return if betting less.
You seemed to get the most bang for your buck if you could invest around $50 a month.
If you sign up through this link, you’ll get $40 added to your Healthywager prize! (And I’ll get $40 as well, win-win 🙂 )
Healthywage Challenges
The smaller challenges are less expensive (around $10 – $30/month for 3 months) and are, for example, things like lose 6% of your body weight or increase your daily step count by 25%. They also have team challenges you can play.
How these small challenges work is your entry fee goes into a pot, and everyone who wins gets to split the pot evenly. How much you win depends on how many winners the challenge had. You’re guaranteed your entry fee back at the very least, but typically you can up 2-2.5x the amount you paid to play (or so they say).
You can do up to 10 of these challenges at a time in addition to your Healthywager bet. Obviously the more you do, the more heavily invested you will be with Healthywage each month (your main bet + 10 additional challenges at a time could really add up!) However if you are confident you can win, it’s a smart bet to make.
My personal Healthywager bet – prize total $1,957
I spent quite a bit of time playing with the calculator to get the most reward with the least risk – and what I settled on was $50/month for 12 months that I can lose 60 lbs. If I do this, I’ll win $1,957. That’s a gain of $1,357 since I am putting $600 in.
The reason why I chose this is that it gave me the greatest return on my investment with the least risk. I’m pretty sure I can lose more than 60 lbs in a year, however, I wanted to play it safe. Betting that I’d lose 70-80 lbs didn’t increase the reward enough for me to want to risk it. Also, $50/month was the limit I wanted to bet each month.
I can obviously lose more weight, I just have to be at or below the 60 lbs lost by December 10, 2019. However, the catch is I can’t weigh in until that date. If I lose 60 lbs by June I can’t weigh in and claim my prize early – I have to wait til December. I at the very least have to maintain my 60 lb weight loss if I happen to lose it early. But I really believe I can keep going. Ideally, I’d like to lose closer to 80 lbs by the end of the year but this way I don’t have to stress and worry about it as much.
How do they verify your weight?
My question before I got involved is how do they verify your weight to know you’re not just making it all up? Well, they have a pretty simple process set up – you can do it one of two ways:
Take pictures – a full body shot + a scale shot with a piece of paper and code word
Video – have someone record you weighing in, making sure to include a full body shot, full turn around and stepping on the scale. You can also do it yourself standing in front of a large full-length mirror.
The video method is the fastest and easiest way to go. I didn’t have an appropriate mirror that would work with me doing it alone, so I had my husband take a quick video of me weighing in. You do have to download their app to do this, but you can record and send the video straight from the app so it’s easy. They also verified my weight straight away.
What if you get pregnant, injured or other life issues get in the way?
I know it seems kinda risky since 6 – 18 months is a pretty long time and anything can happen. But actually, Healthywage is pretty good about working with your personal life. If you get pregnant, you can provide a doctors note and they will suspend your bet until 3 months postpartum (or longer if a doctors note says so). I also heard they can do the same thing if you get injured in an accident provided you can show them a doctor’s note. For anything else you can email the company and ask how they’d deal with it. They’re pretty responsive to messages.
If you don’t have any major life-changing circumstances but you find yourself not meeting your goal towards the end, you can buy more time and extend your deadline for 6 months.
Here’s t0 60 lbs gone in 2019 – I got this!
Okay, so I still have a full year to do this. I’m on track – I’ve already lost 17 lbs in 7 weeks before I placed my Healthywager bet so 60 in a year should be a piece of cake. My average weight loss so far is 2.43 lbs per week – if I kept that current rate throughout the year I could actually lose over twice that much. However, I know it won’t work that way since weight always comes off easier in the beginning. Plus the more weight I lose, the fewer calories I’ll burn so the more I’ll have to cut back or workout.
For anyone that is serious about losing weight, Healthywage is a great investment
You can call this a gamble – but I like to think of it as an investment. If you’re serious about losing weight, it seems pretty smart to get paid for doing it anyway. And the cool part is you don’t have to do anything high risk at all – if you wanted to just bet $10/month that you’d lose a smaller amount of weight, you could do that and still earn money at the end.
As I said, feel free to go to their website and play around with the calculator. This link will actually increase both of our prizes by $40 if you sign up. If anything it’s fun just to mess around with it!
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