Yes, with HealthyWage you really CAN get paid to lose weight. But it’s not easy.
Here’s how it works.
Have you ever tried to get healthier and lose weight, but lost motivation before reaching your goals?
Maybe you’ve gone as far as joining a gym or buying expensive exercise equipment—only for them go unused after your initial commitment.
But what if you could lose weight and make money doing it? Would that be enough motivation to stick with your exercise and diet regimen?
With HealthyWage, you can do just that. HealthyWage is an online company that uses cash prizes (up to $10,000) to make weight loss and fitness more fun and effective.
HealthyWage
4.1
Win up to $10,000 for hitting your weight loss goals.
Get paid to build healthy habitsSet your own goals and timeline
You’ll lose money if you don’t hit your goalPrize may not be motivating enough
How Does HealthyWage Work?
HealthyWage is easy to use, and follows a 7-step process:
Calculate Your Prize
Set Your Weight Loss Goal and Timeline
Make Your Bet
Verify Your Starting Weight
Lose the Weight (that’s the hard part!)
Verify Your Results
Win Money (woohoo!)
Use the Prize Calculator
Start with HealthyWage’s free Prize Calculator to pick your weight loss goal and see how much you can win.
Important Note: Your minimum weight loss goal must be at least 10% of your body weight. For example, a 200 pound person would have to lose at least 20 pounds.
Your goal will include how many pounds you want to lose as well as the time frame (in months) in which you will lose them.
You also will set an amount that you want to bet per month. As you adjust the variables, you’ll notice the prize range goes up and down based on your input.
There’s no commitment yet, so play around with the calculator until you’re comfortable with the weight loss goal and prize range.
Pro Tip: Enter a dollar amount that hurts a little (or a lot). If you put an amount that’s meaningless to you, you’ll be more likely to throw in the towel when the going gets tough.
Enter Your Stats
Next, you’ll be taken through several screens where you’ll enter specific data about yourself, including:
Gender
Height
Current Weight (which will be verified later — no padding the scale!)
Waist Size
See Your Prize Amount
In order to see your prize amount, which is based on the date you entered, you’ll need to enter an email address and create a password.
To test this out, I entered a weight loss goal of 30 pounds in 9 months with a $50 bet monthly. My prize amount ended up being $500, or an 11% return on my “investment”.
HealthyWage uses “a proprietary algorithm” to calculate prizes so prizes might be different for 2 people entering similar information. I played around with different factors but it always presented a similar prize for me.
Just to be clear on how they’re calculating this, I’m putting in $450 ($50 x 9 months), and getting out $500 when I hit my goal — the $50 gain.
To me, that seems like a lot of cash to put at risk for just a $50 gain, but your numbers might look different and there’s the motivation factor of not losing it too.
(The average prize for goal achievers is $1,331.)
Your prize winnings amount is set during this initial setup of your individual challenge, up to $10,000.
The next step is to make your bet, lose the weight, and get paid.
Making Your HealthyWage Bet
Once you’ve received your prize amount, you decide whether you want to place a bet. If you do, you will enter your credit card information.
You can choose to pay all at once or make monthly payments.
Verifying Your Weight
This is one point I was really curious about. What’s to stop people from entering an inflated “starting weight” and cashing in when the pounds miraculously melt away?
The way HealthyWage combats this is by requiring users to verify your initial weight before the challenge starts. (You’ll also do this at the end of the challenge to see if you hit your goal.)
There are two ways to do this:
Download the HealthyWage mobile app (iOS | Android) and have one on their “referees” remotely witness your weigh-in.
Make a short weigh-in video and upload it securely to the HealthyWage website.
The only equipment you need to use HealthyWage is a smartphone and a scale. There are no other “official” weigh-ins during the process, but you can use the app to track your progress.
Finish your Challenge
Your HealthyWage challenge concludes on the appointed date given. To win the prize, you just need to achieve your weight loss goal in the timeframe you set up.
As mentioned earlier, your weight will be verified at the conclusion of the challenge. If you hit your goal, you’ll earn the prize.
If not, you lose the money you wagered on yourself.
The Science Behind HealthyWage
Academic research at Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Pennsylvania found that:
Cash rewards can increase the effectiveness of weight loss programs.
People are more likely to take action when their own money is at risk.
HealthyWage relies on two scientific rules about human behavior: incentives and loss aversion. In simpler terms, the company uses both a “carrot” and a “stick” to motivate participants.
Participants have “skin in the game” by having to wager real money on their weight loss success.
(Though tons of people sign up for gym memberships that they never use so in a sense they are losing money as well.)
There’s something about wagering money, though, that motivates people differently.
In fact, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that people who have a financial incentive to lose weight are five times more likely to reach their weight loss goals than people with no money at stake.
And it seems to be working — last year HealthyWage participants combined to drop over 850,000 pounds!
Those are great results in combatting the obesity epidemic.
How Do I Get Paid by HealthyWage?
Upon winning a challenge, you will earn HW points, valued at one dollar each. HW points will be added to your account by the evening of your prize announcement.
With your HW points, you can do a few things:
Request a payout. (yes!!)
Use HW Points to join a new challenge.
Use HW Points to pay installments on a current challenge (this requires emailing HealthyWage’s accounting department to set up).
HealthyWage pays challenge winners by paper check or PayPal.
According to their website, there is a processing fee for a paper check of $7.00. HealthyWage does not apply a fee for PayPal payouts, but standard PayPal fees of 2.9% + $0.30 may apply.
Employer Programs
HealthyWage offers programs for companies and organizations looking to implement employee wellness programs.
This can potentially help businesses decrease healthcare costs and reduce the number of sick days.
4 Other Ways to Make Money with HealthyWage: Challenges and Referrals
Besides their HealthyWager Individual Weight Loss Bet, HealthyWage offers people other ways to make money. This is done through various individual and team challenges.
You can participate in up to 10 challenges at the same time — a chance to potentially double or triple dip your earning power for the same weight loss.
1. Jackpot Challenges
Available as an individual or team challenge, with Jackpot challenges your money goes into a pot. If you (or your team with the team challenge) loses 6% of your body weight at the end of the challenge, you win the pot.
2. Step Challenge
Connect your step counting device to participate in a step challenge. You can compete as an Individual or as part of a team to try to achieve specific step goals to earn a share of the pot.
3. $10,000 Team Challenge
Teams of 5 compete to lose the greatest percentage of weight to win cash prizes. The top prize is $10,000.
4. Refer Your Friends
It’s easier to make lifestyle changes if your friends are on the same journey. For every friend you refer to make their own HealthyWager, you’ll each earn a $40 prize boost.
That means if you can find 5 friends to join you, you could add $200 to your winnings.
Is HealthyWage Legit?
HealthyWage is legit. They’ve been around since 2009 and have paid out over $52 million to tens of thousands of winners. Participants have lost a collective 10 million pounds!
Still, some people have question whether HealthyWage is an ethical company or a scam. They’re turned off by the fact that it resembles gambling.
On the surface, HealthyWage seems to profit off the fact that the majority of people simply don’t stick with diets or fitness plans.
Co-founder David Roddenberry says that HealthyWage “success rates vary, with between 25% and 40% of participants actually winning their bets.”
“If 100% of the people lost the weight,” he added, “We would be absolutely thrilled.” (Though I’m sure that would hurt the cash flow of the company!)
HealthyWage also makes money from sponsorships, corporate partnerships, and various fees—not just from users who fail to hit their health goals.
Although HealthyWage’s model seems like a gamble, participants have control of the outcome. They decide if they will put in the work and stick with their health plan.
The program is set up to offer higher prize payouts to people with large amounts of weight to lose, which can be hard to accomplish.
HealthyWage Success Stories
My favorite section of the HealthyWage site is their success stories section. That’s where you’ll find actual participants who made the necessary lifestyle changes to lose the weight—and win their bet.
The before-and-after pictures are striking (and motivating)!
For example, Matt in Massachusetts lost 44 pounds in 6 months and won $1050:
Tina in Florida took home $1073 after dropping 40 pounds in 15 months:
In Texas, Lashea lost 57 pounds in 7 months, which earned her $2307:
Michele in Nevada dropped 53 pounds over 9 months and took home $2100 in prize money.
You can check out these and other success stories here, or punch in your goal to see how much your prize would be.
In 2020, more than 45,000 people bet on their weight loss and won. Even celebrities like Sherri Shepherd are getting in on the action, winning $1,300 for hitting her weight loss goal.
HealthyWage Alternatives
HealthyWage isn’t the only weight loss betting website that can earn people money. Following the success of HealthyWage, other sites have popped up that offer similar programs.
Some of those websites include:
DietBet — Similar to HealthyWage. Earn money by betting on yourself to hit your weight loss goal.
RunBet — RunBet hosts games to keep you committed to running. Place your bet, start running, and win. You can run outdoors, on a track or on a treadmill. You just need to sync your program with an approved GPS app.
CashWalk — Tracking and claiming your steps in CashWalk is worth around $5 a month in free gift cards. See our full CashWalk review for more. Get 100 bonus coins w/ referral code MR9W5.
Miles — The new Miles app gives you “frequent flyer miles” for all the travel you do, whether walking, biking, driving, riding, or flying. Don’t expect it to be a huge money-maker though — it takes 1,000-2,000 miles to earn a $1 Amazon gift card.
Evidation — Evidation pays you for keeping healthy habits. Connect various fitness and health apps and start earning money for tracking steps, sleep, meals, and more.
Who is the Ideal HealthyWage Participant?
HealthyWage is a great program for men or women who have a hard time losing weight on their own and need extra motivation.
Or, if you’re committed to making some lifestyle changes anyway, you might as well get paid!
Although HealthyWage can be used by anyone, people who have more weight to lose can make more money. The team challenges encourage a sense of community between participants as they try to reach goals together.
How to Succeed with HealthyWage
Because you’re betting on your ability to lose weight, it’s important to set yourself up for success with the right habits.
Those habits include eating healthy, portion control, and consistent exercise. What else can you do to make sure you meet your weight loss goals and win your wagers?
Have a Plan
To accomplish your goals, it makes sense to spend time formulating a plan for success.
What fitness routines will help lose weight most effectively? What changes do you need to make to your diet? How will you hold yourself accountable?
Use Fitness Tracking Apps
Use an app like My Fitness Pal or Noom to track your fitness goals and what you eat.
This allows you to keep track of your progress and adjust your plan throughout the process. I know I eat better when I’m consistently logging my meals and snacks in My Fitness Pal.
Find Accountability
You’ve already got money on the line, which is definitely one form of accountability!
But whether you join a HealthyWage team or have a spouse or friend help, find someone who can apply some positive peer pressure. This will help keep you accountable to your weight loss goals.
HealthyWage even has a built-in accountability feature called “Lifelines,” where you can enlist trusted friends or family members to support your journey. It’s free to be a Lifeline and they’ll be able to see your weight loss progress, your meal plan, and any mid-challenge photos you post.
Plus, if you refer friends to make their own HealthyWager, you’ll each earn a $40 prize boost.
Is Ozempic Allowed?
Yes. If you’re on a prescription weight-loss medication, you can still participate. This includes GLP-1 medications such as Wegovy, Ozempic, Mounjaro, etc.
(Surgical weight loss procedures like gastric bypass aren’t allowed.)
Is HealthyWage Right for You?
You can make decent money through HealthyWage, depending on your weight loss goals.
This won’t replace your day job salary, but if you’re already considering starting a new diet plan, it could be an added bonus.
If you thrive off extra motivation and have the self-discipline to stick with a fitness program, HealthyWage could earn you extra cash.
Your Turn
Have you tried HealthyWage yet? Did you win your bet?
Serious About Making Extra Money?
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Frequently Asked Questions
Is HealthyWage legal?
While HealthyWage calls their program a “bet”, it’s not really gambling since you technically have control over the outcome. Because of that, the site avoids gambling restrictions and remains legal.
Is HealthyWage legit?
Yes, HealthyWage is a legitimate way to earn money losing weight. How much you can earn will depend on how much you have to lose and your timeline for dropping those pounds. Check out our full HealthyWage review to learn how it works.
Does HealthyWage really pay?
After you verify your weight loss, you can choose to cash out your prize via paper check or PayPal. There is a $7 processing fee to get a paper check issued, but PayPal payouts are free (though PayPal may charge a fee). Check out our full HealthyWage review to learn how it works.
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