The 50 Million Pound Challenge

Channel surfing on a lazy Sunday afternoon brought me to CNN and a news item about something called The 50 Million Pound Challenge - a creation of Dr. Ian Smith, a quite popular medical contributor to such shows as The View and Celebrity Fit Club on VH1. Community-based weight-loss efforts like The Biggest Loser on NBC always pique my interest because they introduce a social concept not found when individuals diet alone at home or workout in the gym. On further inspection I came away with mixed feelings about this site, but I’ll leave you to decide for yourself:

The Goal

The primary goal of the 50 Million Pound Challenge is, as the name suggests, to get all its users to collectively lose 50 million pounds. While this number might, at first glance, seem astronomical, imagine 5 million users losing just 10 pounds each and suddenly, not only is this achievable, but the total probably needs to be increased pretty soon, if this challenge is indeed a success.

Tools

Registering on The 50 Million Pound Challenge website gives you free customizable tools to track your progress in your weight loss effort. You can also get a free Challenge Kit from any local State Farm agent’s office. According to the site, each Challenge Kit contains a pedometer, a health-related booklet from Dr. Ian and also a DVD featuring him.

Once registered, a user is also offered five different tools on the website itself:

1. A Weight Tracker: Simply update your weight every day and you get access to graphs charting your weigh loss progress, calculators for BMI (not a great ratio, in my opinion) etc.
2. Dr. Ian’s 30-day Meal Plan: A full-fledged food-program for the beginning dieter including shopping lists, meal-ideas and even emails with things to buy for the day or week. You get detailed food lists and things to eat on a daily basis on a calendar and it seems fairly simple and intuitive to use. Some of these features are only available in premium websites but is yours for the taking - totally free on this site.
3. My Journal: Your personal diary where you can enter personal thoughts, motivational quotes, your mood during the day, number of glasses of water you rink – literally anything that catches your fancy which you feel might be useful later while analyzing your weight-loss progress.
4. My Activity Tracker: How many miles did you run? Did you do 20 or 30 laps? 5000 steps on your pedometer? This is where you track all of those daily activities. Your exercise routine for the day goes in here as well and all of this is viewable form your Daily Journal as well.
5. My Teams: This is where the social aspect of the site shows itself. Challenge teams can be based on a variety of factors like friends, family or even place of worship or work. You can track the progress of the entire team as a whole and even challenge other teams to certain pre-set goals.

Thoughts

My initial thoughts about the 50 Million Pound Challenge site were along the lines of “Here we go, another weight-loss social network fad”. But as I read about the tools being offered on the site for free and realized that many of these were considered “premium” by other health-sites, I gave it more serious consideration.

While it’s true that Dr. Ian does make numerous references to certain books he has written like The Fat Smash Diet and The 4 Day Diet, I am not going to hold this against the author when he has provided this many free features for free on the site. In fact, he does go out of his way to mention in the FAQs that you need not make any purchase to use the program and goes on to even say that if you already have a diet-exercise regimen that seems to work for you, then you should stick to it and just use the site to keep all your goals, activities and challenges in one place. Some of the challenges on the site however do seem to require that you have read his books though, like the $10000 challenge that asks to you to describe how the The 4 Day Diet has helped you lose weight.

As with all socially-dependent sites, like Wellsphere for example, the success of this one will also depend on how many users remain active on the site and make use of all the features on a regular basis. Scheduling time everyday to enter all the information on the site that would actually make this useful is not something everyone can realistically do. To its advantage, however, the site recently enrolled its millionth member and seems well on its way to actually achieving its primary objective of 50 million pounds lost. What remains to be seen if these million members are motivated and committed enough to stay on track and keep their diaries updated regularly.

So, what say you? Do you believe such sites help or add another step in a person’s quest for fitness? My feeling remains that much depends on the individual.

Tagged as: fitness, health, website, weight loss