Pretty soon after we launched Lose It or Lose It, we realized that if you miss a goal, it’s easy to start getting deeper in trouble. Let’s say you’re trying to lose two pounds a week, and your starting weight is 200 pounds. Your first weigh-ins go great: you start the plan at 200 pounds, then weigh in at 198, 196, and 194 pounds. But the next week, instead of making your goal by weighing in at your goal of 192 pounds, you weigh in at 194 pounds again, two pounds over your goal. You miss the goal, and pay your penalty.

Now, the way things were, next weeks’ goal is the same no matter what — you’d have to weigh in at 190, two pounds less than you were supposed to weigh this week. You’re left with four pounds to lose. Miss that goal, and you’re left chasing a moving target, with the goal getting steadily farther away. Like Rerun chasing the pickup truck at 0:53 in the What’s Happening intro:

We think that this is a bad situation for everybody. If you start to get seriously behind, the program isn’t motivational any more, it’s just a drag. What’s the incentive to make good choices if you’re gonna lose no matter what you do? Since we want a site that works, not just a site that extracts money from unhappy people, we’re changing the way the system handles goals after a missed weigh-in.

Starting today, here’s what’s changed:

• If you make your goal, nothing has changed at all. Hurrah! Make all your goals, keep all your money, brag to your friends :)
• If you miss a goal, next week’s goal will be one, two, or three pounds less than this week’s weight (instead of the “written in stone” goal that it was before.)

Here are some examples to make things clearer:

• Using the example above, you’re on a two-pound-a-week plan, and you started at 200. If this week’s weigh-in goal is 192 pounds, but you weigh in at 194, then next week’s goal will now be 192 pounds, instead of the 190 pounds it would have been before.
• Or, to use another example, if you’re on a one-pound-a-week plan, and this week’s goal is 180 pounds, but you weigh in at 181 (missing your goal), then next week’s goal will be 180. Not 179, like it would have been before.
• To summarize, your goal for each week will never move faster than the one, two, or three pounds per week that you committed to. Miss a weigh-in, and your new goal is to weigh one, two, or three pounds less than you do right now.

We think this is the right way of handling it, and we hope you agree. Please let us know if this seems unclear, or if you really hate the way it works. Of course, if you LIKE this way of doing things, then please let us know that too! :)

User Tinta just completed his Lose It or Lose It plan and made his goal on all ten of his weigh-ins. We’ve started calling a FLAWLESS VICTORY. Not only that, but he made it look easy, with nothing but a laconic smiley-face on each post.

Great work, Tinta! Your official, can’t-be-purchased Lose It or Lose It FLAWLESS VICTORY Nerd Merit Badge is on the way!

We love it when folks make their goals and keep their money, because then we don’t just have a weight-loss-motivation site with a funny premise. We have a weight-loss-motivation site with a funny premise that actually works, which is a much, much more important thing to be involved with. We love it when people lose lots of weight with LIOLI. It’s working for us, and it’s working for these folks! Hurrah!

If you’re like us, you have one group of friends that you talk to on Twitter, and a whole other group of friends, family members and old school chums that you talk to on Facebook. Those Facebook folks are just itching for an opportunity to cheer you on. And now it’s easy to do that!

We’ve added the ability to add your weigh-ins to your Facebook news feed. Get your friends and co-workers to “like” your effort, and to give you all sorts of encouragement! Here’s John’s last weigh-in from this week, as it appeared in his FB feed:

To turn on Facebook integration, sign in to your account and click “Settings” at the top of the screen. You’ll find a “Facebook” link on the left. Click that, then grant Facebook access, and you’re ready to get lots of help and encouragement from your extended Facebook network!

Every Lose It or Lose It user gets a daily reminder: “STEP AWAY FROM THE CHEESEBURGER!” we exhort our users. “DON’T CONCENTRATE ON THAT TWENTY POUNDS, just concentrate on the two pounds you need to lose for your next weigh-in!”

Users can get their reminders either through email or SMS. At least, they could until we discovered that Clickatell, had been accepting our SMS messages for delivery BUT NOT SENDING THEM since February 25th!

Without the SMS reminders, our users were in imminent danger of re-lard-i-fication! What might they do if we are not constantly nagging them to make good choices?

Randy heard about Twilio, a cloud-telephony service that lets your website actually call your users on the telephone and play MP3 files to them (that’s to start with; there’s a whole bunch of XML stuff you can do, too.)  What we needed was an option to replace SMS — and fast!

So during lunch we ran around the corner to the local AM radio station (WCHE 1520 in West Chester, PA), and asked them to let us record some voice reminders to send as outbound telephone calls through Twilio.  John (on the left) and Randy (on the right) are recording one of the message that YOU will hear on your phone when you sign up for a 10-, 20-, or 30-pound Lose It or Lose It plan!

Here’s the message we were recording in the picture above.

MAN, did we have a good time doing this. Especially with JT, the morning-host DJ and studio technician, to clean up our goofy recording and make us sound like we actually know what we are doing. Thanks, JT! We’ll be back to record more reminders! And thanks, Twilio, for making it so easy to solve our SMS emergency!

Voice reminders should appear as an option in your preferences starting this weekend — as soon as Randy stops raging long enough to be able to see his monitor again!

UPDATE: I got my voice message delivered tonight, and I wasn’t fast enough on the draw, so my phone sent it to Google Voice. Here’s the transcript that GV emailed me a minute later. My favorite bit: “now that you’re ON THE ZAR”!

Have problems sticking to a weight-loss plan? It could be because you keep procrastinating! The Economist has some info on why this may be happening. Use Lose It or Lose It to force you to not procrastinate for the next 10 weeks and lose 10-30 lb!

The site Beautiful People just kicked out 5000 members for gaining weight over the holidays (Mashable and Techcrunch). If you are no longer considered beautiful, don’t worry, we’ll still love you and welcome you with open arms! If you use our Lose It or Lose It to lose some weight, they may just take you back. That is, if you want to go back :).

We just pushed an update that allows users to see other user’s weigh-ins. Just click on the “Community” tab at the top of your profile to see how other people are doing. This is currently only visible to Lose It or Lose It users.

If you don’t have an account yet, check out the landing page where we show four random profiles on each page load:

Thank you and we hope this update enhances your Lose It or Lose It experience!

Derek talks about how stating your plans makes you less likely to accomplish them because in your own mind, that is the same thing as actually doing it. Makes sense… however, I think you should announce your plans to lose weight then use Lose It or Lose It to stick to it!

I can’t believe I found this! I was struggling recently with peeling hard-boiled eggs and thought there had to be a better way, and there is! You can also use old(er) eggs but that is a pain to keep track of.