14 DAY TRIAL // Losing weight can be tricky, to say the least, especially if the motivation for it is not there. While some see money (either losing or winning it) as the best incentive to stick to a diet and a workout program, others consider serious punishments are more appropriate. For several journalists, though, the perfect way to keep themselves motivated has turned out to be the possibility of being embarrassed on Twitter.
Drew Magary, an editor at Deadspin, for one, even laid the basis of what he liked to call the Twitter Humiliation Diet, as Yahoo! News informs in a recent piece. The “diet” actually consists of Magary documenting his every move (food-related, that is) and being completely honest with his followers by weighing himself each morning and then posting the numbers on the net. This, of course, comes with the pledge of losing a certain number of pounds by a determined time – should the mission not be completed, humiliation ensues.
The idea behind this approach to weight loss is that a social incentive is stronger than anything one may come up with on oneself, in the sense that the possibility of being publicly ridiculed effectively decreases the chances of falling off the wagon. Many of his followers saw the problem in the same light and even started doing the same on their respective Twitter pages. Suffice it to say that the Twitter Humiliation Diet went viral – and has been seeing a boost in followers for the past few weeks.
“I knew that I needed a social incentive to do it. Imagine if someone printed out their weight every day at work and posted it outside their cubicle for all their co-workers to see. This was the same thing. I never even had a scale, I never weighed myself. You know how you go to the doctor and they make you get on a scale, and then your weight comes up and you’re like, ‘Well I had a big lunch today’...that was me,” Magary explained for Yahoo! News a few days back.
He wasn’t the only one to take to Twitter to achieve his goal, as Brian Stelter of the New York Times also did the same, though perhaps not aware of something called the Twitter Humiliation Diet. He set up a page to document his journey to eating healthily and to learning how to mend his relationship with food. In return, he found an entire Twitter community dedicated to the same thing, and his initiative turned out to be a major hit in more aspects than initially estimated.
“I knew that I needed to tell everyone I knew what I was doing, otherwise I wouldn’t do it, but I also needed advice. Seemingly everybody is trying to eat better and lose weight, and it’s great being able to ask people questions,” Stelter said for the same media outlet.