New Year, New You

In honor of the new year and new years resolutions - we want to introduce the app Gympact to you.

don't be sad and sit on couch like this girl
(photo by gympact)

The other day a friend of mine was reading a book on neuroscience, Incognito by David Eagleman. Incognito focuses on the unconscious mind as what really controls our behavior. In one particular section it mentioned that the brain responds best to penalties more than rewards- especially when the penalties can be realized immediately. Yes it is good to reward yourself for doing well with your new gym regimen but the actual best way to lose weight is to think about it in the same way you think about money. People are better with budgeting than with weight loss because of the penalties inflicted from bad budgeting and the immediacy of the loss.  The book recommends that you give someone control of your bank control and set a date for when you will have lost those 10 pounds you keep saying you want to lose. If you have not lost the weight by the set date, you lose a certain amount of money each day until you achieve your goal. Sounds terrifying - but think about it - I would go to the gym and work hard every day if I were losing money for not achieving my goal.

Also keep in mind - this is a neuroscience book so take the suggestion with a grain of salt.

That’s exactly what a few iPhone app programmers did. They took this concept (not sure if they read the book or not...) and created Gympact. Gympact is a free app to download- but once you download it you immediately have to choose how many times that week you will go to the gym and place a price for each missed work out. Hayley has an iPhone (it hasn’t come to android market yet) so we downloaded the app to play with it. The minimum price for a missed workout is $10. Seems steep but if you make all your workouts you have the possibility of earning money from the app too! 


The creators of the app, Harvard graduates, say that in their studies they saw that people complete their work outs 80-90% of the time when there is a negative incentive. Seems like it’s worth a shot.

Happy New Year!


check out the app here