Bets are on if you want to show commitment

At 12-and-a-half stone, no one would have called Tom Finkelpearl obese. "I was just a little chubby," he says. "I ate healthy food but too much of it. I never stuck to a diet."

Although gambling may still be illegal in certain US states, betting publicly against oneself, and/or others, is gaining popularity. Stickk.com lets users make public commitment contracts: it has more than 80,000 users, 1,000 of them UK-based, and more than £3 million is currently placed in bets.

Finkelpearl and Helguera began with a goal: to lose eight pounds and 10 pounds respectively, in two months. Weekly weigh-ins would assess progress. The penalty for failing to lose weight any week would be a $25 (£17) donation to the National Rifle Association (NRA) Foundation.

According to Jordan Goldberg, the 25-year-old Yale graduate and co-founder of the site, Finkelpearl and Helguera are among the 45 per cent of Stickk.com users whose goals are weight-related. Around 15-20 per cent of users make commitments to exercising regularly, while the remaining third cite financial goals, academic endeavours and colourful ambitions. "People have committed to learning how to use chopsticks, speaking more slowly to foreigners and having sex with their wives three times a week," says Goldberg. One man is betting against his own ability to avoid pornography for three months. If he fails, his local sex club wins $900 (£600); if he wins, he buys himself lifetime membership to a shooting club.

The website is the brainchild of two of Goldberg's professors at Yale, Dean Karlan and Ian Ayres, who were keen to find out why so many people so often failed to reach their goals. The answer, they found, was not enough incentive.
The success rate of contracts made on Stickk.com using financial incentives (bets) and accountability (monitoring by wives, friends and the site itself) is 74 per cent. With the added twist of a regular donation to an "anti-charity" upon failure, for example to the NRA, the gay marriage lobby or even the George W Bush Library, the reported success rate rises to 80 per cent. "It's not about the money, it's about the public humiliation," says Finkelpearl. "The NRA stands for everything I hate," agrees Helguera. "I couldn't bear the shame if I had to give money to them."

With a week to go, Finkelpearl and Helguera are on target. However, they admit it is unlikely that they will celebrate in the same way as Will Blodgett, a 27-year-old Wall Street worker, and the three friends with whom he competed in a six-week bet diet. All lost weight and they marked the occasion with a $1,000 dinner at a New York steakhouse. The loser paid half, the second- and third-placed men split the remainder. The winner ordered more drinks.