Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing - Losing Weight and the Power of Scale

Episode Date: April 7, 2020

Trying to lose weight? Might be time to change the scale. Dan Ariely, professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University, offers up some weighty advice on losing weight. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With The Motley Fool Money Extra, I'm Matt Greer. Now, as investors, we often hear about the value of taking a long-term perspective and ignoring the day-to-day noise. So what if that same approach can be applied to losing weight? Dan Ariely is a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. He's a best-selling author whose books include Payoff, the hidden logic that shapes our motivations. Some of that hidden logic might just help us lose weight. We know it's good to step on a scale every morning.

It's not good to step on a scale every night. And the reason it's good to step on a scale every morning is you remind yourself that you want to be healthy. We also know that weight fluctuates a lot. And because of loss aversion, or in this case, gain aversion, a day that you gain two pounds is really miserable. A day you lose two pounds is happy, but it doesn't make up for it. So the overall experience people have with the scale is negative, right? You stand up on this thing and it's mostly bad news.

And finally, people expect the body to react much faster than it actually does. So what happens is people go on a diet for two days, then they step on the scale and the weight goes up by half a kilo or a pound. Then they go on a day of Netflix and the weight goes down and people get very confused and demotivated. So we said, let's separate two functions. Let's get people to step on the scale. It's a good thing to step on the scale. Let's get them to step on the scale. And then we said, on top of that, let's give people feedback, but not at the granularity of a day by day granularity. Let's give them a running average of the last three weeks. And then let's give it in a trend. So a trend could say, you're just the

same, slightly better, slightly worse, much better, much worse. So we did a study with this approach and a third of the people got a regular scale that reported their weight in pounds with a decimal. And two thirds got our scale that doesn't have a display and give people the trend of the last three weeks. And what we found is that the people who got the regular scale gained a bit weight every month. And the people who got our scale lost 0.7% of their body weight every month for five months. The study lasted five months. And this is incredible news, right? It basically says you take a scale and you just make it better. And all of a sudden people can use the information much better and start understanding what's causing weight changes and control their weight

in a better way. So the trend really is your friend. Dan Ariely's newest book is Amazing Decisions, the Illustrated Guide to Improving Business Deals and Family Meals. I'm Matt Greer.

Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.