Do Weight Loss Challenges Work? (What to Do Instead)

We evaluate weight loss challenges and why they can make you "win" on the scale while losing muscle, bone, and momentum toward your true goal of improving how you look and feel.

Learn what the research says about rebounds after incentives end and the 3 metrics to track instead for sustainable fat loss over 40, including:

• How challenges can reward extreme dieting and too much cardio while devaluing lifting 

• What studies show about lean mass and bone loss despite similar weight loss

• What financial incentive research finds once prizes and payments stop 

• Why workplace wellness challenges often fail to move long-term health outcomes

• What the Biggest Loser follow-up does and does not prove about metabolism

• How to set goals against your own baseline for better maintenance

• What to track instead and what improves outcomes the most

If you want your next challenge to leave you leaner and stronger instead of just lighter, hit play.

Join our 12-Week Dialed In Fall Challenge, 12 weeks of Dialed In coaching inside Eat More Lift Heavy for adults over 40, with 3 goals scored against your own starting point through the holidays. It starts Monday, October 12, and the winner gets 3 months of free coaching plus a private call with me and Carol:
https://witsandweights.com/challenge

Timestamps:

0:00 - Weight loss challenges and what they measure
4:23 - What the scale is actually measuring
6:07 - Cardio, lifting, and the TEMPO diet trial
8:56 - The better way to score your results
12:37 - What happens after the incentives end
16:28 - The Biggest Loser follow-up
19:00 - What to measure instead of weight loss
26:55 - Bonus: one thing before your next fat loss phase to increase your chances of maintaining results long-term

Episode Resources:

• Join the 12-Week Dialed In Fall Challenge

• Transcript

  Weight loss challenges and what they measure

  Philip Pape 0:00

  If you've done a weight loss challenge, lost weight, and then gained it back once it was over, this episode is for you. Today I'm evaluating weight loss challenges. Do they work and what happens after they end? You'll learn why you can win a weight loss challenge, but still come out worse in the end, plus the three things that I would track instead for fat loss over 40. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, Philip Pape. I'm a certified nutrition coach, and this episode is for men and women. And it is October, as this is coming out. A lot of you are getting invited to challenges right now, or you're thinking about how do I end the year successfully through the holidays before we get to the whole New Year's craze. I personally just came back from a family vacation. We went to Europe for 12 days. It was amazing to celebrate our 20th anniversary. I didn't track, I enjoyed my food, lots and lots of bread in France, let me tell you. And, you know, I'm also thinking the same thing. Like, how do I end the year successfully, especially with, you know, a plan, protocol, people to support me, all the right things that we need to succeed. So maybe your gym is running a challenge, maybe your work has one, maybe you have a friend that's putting together something where everybody puts their money in. You know, it's it's college football season, so you've got pools for that. Maybe you've got pools for weight loss. I don't know. The idea here is that having a deadline to shoot for and having some sort of incentive, and maybe it is an external incentive like a prize, money, what have you, will give you the push you need to finally do what you've been putting off. And for some of you, that might be to lose the weight, but of course, we're going to unpack that statement today. If you are on the older side, if you're over 40, like me, and you lift weights, you've probably done a few of these challenges. Maybe on social media, there's free challenges, paid, whatever. Way back on, or way back, not too far back, on episode 499, I mentioned that a lot of you like challenges because they give you a burst of motivation, uh, but then they end. So today I want to look at what happens when they end, what they measure, which is almost always weight loss, but I've been in plenty of challenges that measure a bunch of different things. But I do think weight loss is the wrong thing to measure. Anybody who's been following the show knows that already, but I'm gonna explain why, because I want you to come out of this healthier, fitter, stronger feeling and looking better than you started. Because at the end of the day, that's what we want from any change or any improvement. Why suffer through a quote unquote challenge, lose weight on the scale, then you gain it back, or even if you don't gain it back, it didn't really give you what you wanted. Now, full disclosure, Coach Carol and I are running a challenge starting October 12th. And I'm gonna talk about it in this episode because I have a financial interest in, you know, challenges as well and coaching. And I always like to be up front about our ethics on this show. In fact, we actually now have an ad ethics policy on our website for sponsors as well. So keep that in mind as you listen. I'm gonna tell you where the research supports how we set our very different challenge up. I'll say it's different, but it's it's very simple too. Uh, where it doesn't, because there are definitely gaps where pretty much any challenge doesn't always do what you think it does. And you got you want to know all that. Then stick around to the end because I always have a little something for you. Today, it's one thing that you can do before your next fat loss phase that in one study nearly tripled the number of people who kept all their weight off six months later. And it takes one text message. Okay. So here's our roadmap for today's episode. First, I want to look at what the scale is measuring when a challenge uses weight loss as the score, why that's the wrong measure for body composition. It's a good refresher for those of you who follow the show and maybe a new concept for those of you who who are new. Then I'm gonna look at what the cash incentive studies, as well as a big or some big workplace wellness studies found happens after the end of a challenge. After they, you know, they have a lot of people in these challenges, they give some sort of incentive, prizes, points, et cetera. What happens afterward? That of course includes the biggest loser follow-up, which I'm always gonna be careful with, but I think it's important to mention. And then we'll cover what I would measure instead. If your goal is to lose fat without losing muscle, and that is really the whole game that we're going for, and probably why you're listening to this show in general.

  What the scale is actually measuring

  Philip Pape 4:23

  All right, so let's start with what the scale is measuring when we think of body weight. When a challenge is ranking you on pounds lost or percent of body weight loss, and trust me, this is the vast majority of challenges I still see today, whether it's in a physical gym or online, it is measuring, I'll say, all of your mass at the same time, right? Fat, but also water, glycogen in your muscles and liver, the food in your gut, your muscle, some bone mass, right? The your scale weight can't separate those things out. It's just your total weight, your gravity to the earth. So when you reward weight loss, you are definitely creating the wrong incentive. Because if you want to win a six or eight-week weight loss challenge, you could definitely gain the system, right? The fastest way is cut your calories way down, do a lot of cardio, probably drop a bunch of water and glycogen in the first couple of weeks, definitely if the carbs come down, and then not worry too much about lifting weights because that's not going to affect your weight loss that much. And the person, you know, you get these real overachievers who are super involved in the challenge, but they're also, I don't want to say they're gaming it on purpose. They're following what the challenge is having you do, and that is to lose weight as fast as possible, usually, or who loses the most weight or whatever. And then they win the challenge the challenge. But that's not what you're trying to get out of this, I hope. I mean, unless you're doing it specifically for the prize and you just want to game a contest to get a prize, that's a different story. I think that you want to be leaner and stronger and you want to keep that result for the long haul, don't you? Now you might be thinking, okay, Philip, I lost 15 pounds in my last challenge and I felt great. Okay, I believe you. The question is, was that all body fat? Right. And we have a good study on this.

  Cardio, lifting, and the TEMPO diet trial

  Philip Pape 6:07

  Dennis Villarreal and colleagues published a trial in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2017. They took 160 adults over 65 with obesity, men and women, and they put everyone on the same diet. Then they split them into three groups: aerobic exercise, aka cardio, resistance training, or both. Everybody lost about the same amount of weight. It was about 9% of their body weight over six months. So that's that's great, right? And if it was a weight loss challenge, they'd all be tied, but that's beside the point. The aerobic or cardio group lost about 5% of their lean mass. The resistance training group lost about 2%. Hip bone density went down 3% in the aerobic group and only half a percent in the resistance group. So think about that. They lost the same weight, but the lifting group kept more than twice as much muscle and most of their hip bone mass. And guess what? The group that did both cardio and lifting improved their physical function the most. And very little of that, if not none of that, shows up on the scale, obviously by definition, because they all lost the same amount of weight, but very different results. Then there's a study in post-menopausal women. I don't think I've talked about this one before, called the Tempo Diet Trial. There were 100 women between 45 and 65. One group did a severe diet, it was like a 65 to 75% calorie deficit. The other group did a moderate one, about 25 to 35%. Now, if you were scoring this along weight loss as the metric, of course, the more aggressive, severe deficit group is going to win. Just energy balance, calories in, calories out works every time. They lost about twice as much weight at 12 months. And to be fair, three years later, 42% of them had kept off at least 10% of their weight compared to 16% in the moderate group. So that's a point for faster dieting, which we've talked about this before, fast versus slow. And, you know, when should you use one or the other? You know, they all can work in different ways. But the severe dieting group also lost about two and a half times as much bone density at 12 months. And then at three years, it was still double the loss. So the group that would have won the weight loss challenge was also the group that had worse results for their health and their body composition. They lost the most bone. And for a woman after menopause, that is a bad trade-off, in my opinion. Okay. So that's the first part of the problem, right? Weight loss is a big jumbled metric that accounts for fat, water, muscle, bone, as if they're the same thing. And just trying to lose weight is probably not the best way to go in general. And I could just end the podcast right there and say, like, that's a great lesson to learn. But we're gonna continue because I want you to know what to track to be successful. And since

  The better way to score your results

  Philip Pape 8:56

  I told you I have a stake in this, I'm gonna tell you about our challenge coming up. It's called the dialed-in fall challenge. And it is not, no surprise, it is not a weight loss challenge. You are not ranked against anyone else on pounds lost, but stick with me because weight still is part of the data set, okay? It's 12 weeks. You get direct coaching, dialed-in coaching inside our Eat More Lift Heavy program. Dialed-in means that Coach Carroll's your own coach inside the program. She's gonna build a custom nutrition blueprint for you, review your data every week, checks your form. This is a human being, it's not AI, it's not a course, even though there's lots of education and information behind it. It starts Monday, October 12th, and it goes through Thanksgiving and Christmas into the early new year. And we did that on purpose because this is when most people take a break, they gain a bunch of weight, maybe not as much as some people claim, but gain a bunch of weight, don't feel great, and plan to start over in January with New Year's resolutions, and the cycle begins anew. So here's how it works: you pick three goals. That's it. One is that at least one is an outcome goal, like your waist measurement or your strength on the lift, or yes, even your trend weight, not your scale weight, but your average of weight over time measured against yourself. And the others can be habits like hitting your protein or getting your workouts in. And your coach, Carol, she's gonna look at these and approve your targets with you to make sure they make sense. And you are scored against yourself. You're trying to beat yourself. The scores are capped. So losing more weight faster isn't gonna get you extra points. We're not trying to incentivize extremity here. We're trying to incentivize improvement. And then the prize is you get three months of free coaching plus a private two-on-one call with uh Carol and me, which is a nice little incentive, but hopefully the bigger incentive is the result you get from being challenged and having the support and accountability through what for many is the toughest time of the year. I want to tell you about Pauline real quick. She's one of our Eat More Lift Heavy members. When she started in March, she didn't think that she could stick with anything, especially for six months. Okay, that's that's how long our normal program is. I know I'm talking about a 12-week challenge, but just hear me out. So by week 25, that's almost the last week of the six months, her physical changes were smaller than she wanted. She said stress and sleep got in the way. Her life had changed, things came up, right? Which is reality. So, on a weight loss perspective, she wouldn't quote unquote win. But she tracked every single day. She never missed. She trained three times a week, she never missed a workout, and she is now lifting heavier than she ever thought she could. She's stronger, has more muscle mass, feels better, eating more food. And about the scale, the scale weight, which used to drive her crazy. Like many of you, raise your hand. The scale drives you crazy. She wrote, Oh, yeah, this is what that number is there. No biggie, let's keep going. I said that very awkwardly as I was reading the quote. This is why that number is there. No biggie, let's keep going. That is the type of person I want to see doing this type of challenge because those are the habits that last long after the challenge is over that will ultimately give you the outcome you want in the long term. All right, so this dialed-in challenge, we limit the amount of people joining. So I want you to go to witsandweig.com slash challenge for the details and sign up before it starts Monday, October 12th. Everyone who's in by then will be in the challenge. You'll be able to come up with specific goals, track against them, be in the running for the prize, but most importantly, have that level of oversight, accountability, and support you need to get through the holiday successfully and come out the other side. So go to witsandweights.com slash challenge. Okay, so that's the first problem, the metric.

  What happens after the incentives end

  Philip Pape 12:37

  The second problem is what happens after the challenge is over. And I want to be fair here because challenges and challenges and incentives, they do work quite well when they exist. Like while the challenge is active. This is why humans are really good with like setting goals and having seasons and New Year's results. I'm not saying we're good with New Year's resolutions, but we we at least use these different points in our life to set goals for ourselves and challenge us to do something. Maybe it's a competition. A challenge is kind of like a competition, right? So we like these things as human beings because behaviorally they get us to do things, they get us to take action. Now, the best known study I want to talk about is from Kevin Volp and colleagues at Penn, published in JAMA in 2008. They took 57 adults with obesity, almost all men, veterans in Philadelphia. One group got a lottery, and one group got a deposit contract. And that's where you put your own money in and then you get it back if you hit your target. Kind of sounds like a lot of those gym challenges that Hormosy made famous, right? Where you would pay money and then you get it back if you win. But really, it was kind of scammy because a lot of people didn't make it through, so they just kept your money. Okay, so I don't I don't like that, but that's that's how this is structured in a research setting. So after 16 weeks, the lottery group lost about 13 pounds and the deposit group lost about 14, compared to only four pounds in the control group. So kind of a big difference between the the two experimental groups and the control group. But then they checked again at seven months, which is three months after the incentives stopped, the monetary incentives. The lottery group was down about nine pounds from the start, the deposit group about six, and the control group about four. And the difference between them was no longer statistically significant. Then what's cool is the same group ran a follow-up study led by Leslie John in 2011, where they did deposit contracts for 32 weeks. The incentive group lost 8.7 pounds, the control group lost one. 36 weeks after it ended, the incentive group was still down 1.2 pounds, and the control group was down a quarter of a pound. So the advantage there was gone after time passed. So my point with all of this stuff, I hope I didn't bore you, is that challenges, incentives, they work in the moment, but they don't often last, right? They don't often last past that point. And this is why a lot of people revert to previous weight gain, for example. There's also meta-analysis from just this year, 2026, in obesity reviews. This is where they pull a bunch of studies together. So this was 29 studies with more than 5,700 people. And there was a small effect of the weight loss while the incentives were running. And then when they stopped, the effect was zero. Fewer of the studies measured what happened afterwards. So I wouldn't put as much stock into that finding, but it matches the individual studies. Anyway, we also have workplace wellness programs. Now I've done some consulting for different companies in terms of wellness, even like mindfulness, even though that's not my bag, I guess, or my expertise. But there's a lot of these programs where there's different challenges and they have point systems, you could exchange them for gift cards, all that fun stuff. There was, there's, they've studied these, right? So the Illinois Workplace Wellness Study randomized over 4,800 university employees. There's a BJ's wholesale club study that included 33,000 employees at 160 work sites, and neither one found meaningful changes in clinical health measures after 18 months or more. The Illinois researchers found that people who signed up were already healthier and spending less on healthcare before the program started. So they effectively attracted the people who needed them least, right? Just so you're aware of that. And now the biggest loser I have to mention, this study gets misused all the time. Kevin Hall's group at the NIH, they

  The Biggest Loser follow-up

  Philip Pape 16:28

  followed 14 former contestants for six years. They lost 128 pounds on average during the show, which lasted for 30 weeks. And then six years later, they regained on average 90 of those 128 pounds. Where people misuse this is the metabolism part. Yes, their resting metabolism was lower than predicted, but how much it had slowed down at the end of the show did not predict who regained weight. The people who kept the most weight off had the most slowing of their metabolism six years later. Interesting, right? Other research from Katia Martins and colleagues found that metabolic adaptation of about 54 calories a day happened after weight loss and it wasn't detectable a year or two later. So this is why I don't buy the metabolic damage idea, which I've talked about on many recent episodes. The biggest loser just shows that an extreme contest can be followed afterward by a lot of regain. That's it. It doesn't really tell us much about metabolism like some people claim. Now, there is a study that goes in the other direction. Okay, it's from the UK called Game of Stones. I love that name. It was published this year. It had 585 men with obesity, average age of 51. They got text messages plus a financial incentive set up as money that they could lose. Their targets were 5 and 10% of their starting weight over 12 months. Now the incentive group lost almost 5%, or I should say 4.8% of their body weight. The control group only lost 1.3%. And the researchers saw that there was a meaningful level of maintenance out to two years later. But they only had data on like two-thirds of the men by then. So in some cases, this this says incentives may last past the point that they end, like in terms of uh maintaining the weight loss. But the ones that seem to last tend to run longer and they use targets based on your own starting point, and they include actual support of some kind. So we'll get to that in a minute. Now you've probably heard people say that paying people to lose weight kills their motivation. And there's a theory of psychology behind that. But in the weight loss studies that tested this directly, the incentives did not reduce people's own motivation. I think that the simpler explanation is the reward went away and you had nothing in its place. So now you have this vacuum, and of course, you're going to revert to old behavior in many cases. All right.

  What to measure instead of weight loss

  Philip Pape 19:00

  So what do you do instead? I think a challenge can be a great structure. You just have to change what you're measuring. Stop using weight loss as the be-all end-all. Measure the things that tell you whether your body composition is changing compared to where you started. I actually asked this question in our Facebook group and people gave responses. I said, if if you had to track something other than weight loss, what would it be? And I had some good answers. It was like body fat percentage and lifts and things like that, all thinking the right thing, right? And even then, you you have to evaluate like if I want to track body fat percentage, is that really what I want to track? Or do I want to track a proxy or a direct measurement that affects body fat, like my waist measurement, for example? So I want you guys to think through like what's the most direct, easily measurable thing. So first, you're gonna compare yourself to your own starting point. Almost every incentive study that resulted in long-term maintenance of their results used targets based on each person's own baseline, like 5% of your starting weight, 10%, a pound a week, whatever, as opposed to competing against others or absolute numbers, if that makes sense. Okay, now there is not a study that directly compares that approach to ranking people against each other. So this is more of a consistent pattern from what we have seen, not you know, total proof, which is very hard to get in science, especially nutrition science. Second, you should have more than one goal and make at least one of them an outcome. Now, why is this important? Okay, there's a 2023 study called Firework that looked at 668 lower income adults, 80% of them were women, average age of 48. One group got paid for losing weight, one got paid for hitting behavior goals, and one group just got the resources. Six months later, 49% of the weight group lost at least 5% of the body weight compared to 39% of the behavior group and only 22% of the resource group. And then at 12 months, the two paid groups were at about the same, around 41%. The 2026 meta-analysis found that incentives worked better when they targeted more than one thing, and worse when they only targeted habits. So I would have habits in there, but not only habits. You want to have at least one outcome. So we're talking outcome-based goals and habit-based goals. At least one of each, I recommend a total of three. That is actually how our challenge is set up because it's simple. Three is a nice round number, gives you a little flexibility. And also, if you don't do as well on one, you can kind of make up for it on the others and still get that psychological win. For body composition, the outcomes that I would use are your waist measurement, your strength on a main lift. It could be multiple lifts, but I would pick one you're really focused on, like your squat, deadlift, whatever. And your trend weight, which is your moving average over time, which is much more representative of body fat than an individual number. And I don't mean like just take it once a week and average it. I mean do it daily. Here's why the scale isn't enough on its own. Okay. The Swan study, the famous Swan. Study we've talked about that followed more than 1200 women through the menopause transition and used exascans. Their fat gain doubled. Lean mass started to go down, but body weight didn't really change because or any faster than it was changing, because the fat gain and the muscle loss canceled each other out on the scale. Now I talked about menopause weight gain in episode 501. Check it out. I won't go through it all here. If you want to check that out, it's episode 501. And and guys, men, gentlemen, it works the other way for you too, right? If you're if you're lifting and eating enough protein, you can lose fat and gain muscle while the scale stays the same. So measuring only weight is gonna sell you short when it comes to this. And you also got to think about like when you do a challenge, you may not even be trying to lose fat per se, anyway. Like if your goal is body recomp, you may not even want to have your scale weight or trend weight as a goal because it's not gonna change on purpose, right? So using your waist, your strength, your trend weight together for outcomes, if you were to do this on your own and have multiple measures, that's my recommendation as like a coach. Okay. No study has tested all these combinations. We have very poor research on like the overall coaching experience and tracking and measuring lots of things together. But look, if your waist is going down and your lifts are going up, you're losing fat and keeping muscle. It's that simple, even if the scale isn't moving much. Now, if the scale's dropping fast and your lifts are dropping, that to me is also a red flag, anyway. Like just because you're losing weight fast, but you're getting weaker and losing muscle, that's not good either. So that's that's the second thing is the, you know, having more than one goal, making at least one of them an outcome. Other ones can be habits, like we mentioned before. I'm not even going to get into the details on that here, but you know what I mean. It could be steps, it could be uh protein. There's lots of habits. The third thing is to cap the score. Now, this is interesting. If you get, you know, if you're giving yourself more points for doing something faster, you're back to the original problem where going more extreme, it doesn't mean more of a good thing. Does that make sense? Like it's got to be realistic within the time frame. And so you set your goals based on that. And that's why, like in our challenge, we have a coach looking at it with you and saying, This makes sense or this doesn't make sense. Here's what makes more sense. Because we don't want you losing the challenge just because you have unrealistic expectations either. Fourth, this is the last point I'm making in this section, is have someone who knows what they're doing look at, approve, sanity check your targets. Kind of what I just mentioned that we do in our challenge with a coach. We we know that the 2026 meta-analysis I talked about, incentives paired with active support, where someone is working with you, perform better than incentives paired with passive things, like a handout, like education or something. That's that's the closest evidence I have. It's indirect evidence, but I think it makes intuitive anecdotal sense as well that having support versus not having support is going to make you more successful. I mean, just seems logical. Now, with all four of these, you keep lifting weights. You keep lifting weights because we know adding resistance training helps you preserve your lean mass, helps you get the result you want, helps you get the body composition you want. If you take one thing from this episode, keep lifting, even if you go into a deficit. And if you're one of the folks that reach out to me that's new to my list or the show, and you just have this thing, this allergy to lifting weights, and I've seen it in some, I've I've seen it like very direct, like, well, I'm not gonna do that. So what else can I do? And it's like, I'm sorry, you have to be lifting weights. If you want better health, better function, better aging, longevity, lower insulin sensitivity, easier fat loss, the list goes on and on. All right. The last thing to do is to plan out what happens after the challenge before you start the challenge. These studies all show that the results tend to fade when the incentives go away. So if you can decide on day one what you're gonna continue afterwards so you don't have a big gap, okay, that is gonna help you a lot. For some people, that's continuing on with the coaching that you signed up for. Like if you join our challenge, you're welcome to continue. And whoever wins the challenge will get their next three months free anyway. But all right, before we wrap up, I told you I'd share one thing that nearly tripled how many people kept their weight off, involving a text message. I'm gonna get that to us to a second, but just a last reminder about the challenge, because this is really important, guys. If you want this kind of support and accountability and a challenge set up the exact way I described in this episode with three goals, a starting point, cap scorers, someone to look at it, make sure it's the right challenge to give you guidance along the way. And most importantly, each week help you make the adjustments needed to be successful with your training, your nutrition, your sleep, your stress, all of it through the holidays, through Thanksgiving, through Christmas, go to witzawaits.com slash challenge. It starts Monday, October 12th, goes for 12 weeks. The prize for the winner is three months of free coaching plus a private two-on-one call with me and Carol. But you win anyway by getting the result because of the support. So go to Witsawaits.com slash challenge.

  Bonus: one thing before your next fat loss phase to increase your chances of maintaining results long-term

  Philip Pape 26:55

  All right, before your next fat loss phase, here's the tip I have for you. Decide who you're gonna do it with. Okay, now this is a very open statement. Do I mean having one accountability partner who's a family member? No. This is a very open statement. All right, there was a study by Wing and Jeffrey with 166 people in a four-month weight loss program. Some of them joined alone, others joined with three friends or family members and got social support strategies on top. Of the people who joined alone, 24% kept all their weight off for the next six months. In the group that joined with friends and got support, 66% kept all of it. So before you start your next challenge or goal or whatever, text one person and ask them if they want to do it with you and check in with each other with each other once a week. It's a it's a classic accountability partner strategy. Family counts. And of course, if you're in our challenge, you're going to have that by default. You're gonna have a group that starts the same week and you're gonna have a coach. You're gonna have the community support and you're gonna have the coaching support, which means you will be successful if you put in the work. Um, if you can bring a friend along, even better. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, weight loss is just one number. It often doesn't tell you what you're truly achieving. Things like your waist, your strength, your habits tell you a lot more about what's happening to your body. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.