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! :)






