6-Week Body Transformation Challenges, 75Hard, & Survivor Bias
You are being marketed to. Everywhere you go, everything you watch and everything you read probably has some component of marketing involved. It’s not always nefarious. For instance, I’m marketing to you with this article. I don’t have anything to sell you yet, but I do want you to read the entirety, like it and follow me so that you will read future articles of mine. Then if I do have something to sell you in the future, you are more likely to buy it.
If you have any interest in fitness and nutrition you have undoubtedly seen countless advertisements for 6 or 8 week body transformation challenges. Perhaps a friend of yours got you to sign up for one to be their accountability partner. You see the before and after pictures of the previous winners and you think, maybe this is just the motivation you needed to kickstart your Summer body. You decide to sign up. You download the app (there is always an app), pay the subscription, take your before pictures and join the private Facebook group. You enter week 3 of the contest and you were feeling good. You go to take the progress pictures for that week or weigh in and there is no change or worse, you gained a little back from what you lost the first two weeks. You lose motivation and “accidently” forget the next weigh-in/progress picture check-in. All is lost and you gain back all the weight you just lost. Good news though! The Fall 8-Week Halloween Transformation Challenge begins in just a few weeks and you will totally nail that one.
Does this all sound familiar? Don’t feel bad. There are so many and so enticing for a reason. Many people sign up for them, myself included (multiple times). So what went wrong? How do those winners complete their transformation and you did not? Enter survivor bias.
Survivor bias is the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not, usually because of their lack of visibility. This is exactly what we do with these transformation challenges.
We see the past winners and designate a level of efficacy for the programs/app/ebook based on them. The problem is that we have incomplete information. We need to know how many people signed up and how the non-winners results went. What is worse is that we don’t even know if the winners followed the program at all. If there is a monetary prize, people will do all sorts of shenanigans with the progress pictures and even use drugs to win money. I have even seen the same people win multiple contests. They have become so good at manipulating how they look they just keep re-entering the contests. The people running these contests know this and most just don’t care.
They know that some percentage of people will at minimum get results in some fashion in order to win the prize. They only need to select the end physiques that fit their particular branding and ignore the rest. They are 6 or 8 week’s long because they cycle between 6 and 8 of these challenges a year that way and see a big bump in their subscriptions, downloads, likes, etc.
75Hard is another take on the transformation challenge. It consists of 5 tasks to complete every single day for 75 days. It involves a structured diet, exercise, drinking water, reading and taking progress pictures each day (you need to have before and after pictures for marketing). If you fail a day, you start back at day 1. It is admittedly hard. It’s in the name itself. All the rules are excellent things that people should do, but the fact that it is so hard leads to a problem with survivor bias. Of course the program works for those that are listed on the website. What percentage of people that started it have success? The people that do get through 75 days; where are they in a month or 6 months after the program?
There is a couple reasons why these programs don’t work for the majority of people.
First, there is an artificial start and end date. There is no reason you are choosing when to begin and when to end, those dates are being given to you by a marketer. This is an issue because the reason you want to make a change is probably the biggest contributor to whether you will be successful or not. If you want to get into better shape because you have a beach vacation, that’s great. We all know that feeling and that will be a much stronger influence on you than a body transformation contest ends. The reason? On your beach vacation you will be on the beach and you will be in a bathing suit. When the body transformation challenge ends, you can always decide not to take the after pictures and forget the whole thing.
The second issue is a lack of investment. Most of these apps and ebooks associated with these types of challengers are relatively inexpensive. They are below a threshold where our brains would tell us not to waste the money. We are likely to impulsively sign up. That also means we will impulsively quit. $9.99 isn’t enough of a cost to keep us motivated and going forward.
How do we combat these two issues in order to make real progress? Stacking events and investing in change.
Say you have a beach vacation coming up and you have gotten into decent shape, but as the vacation approaches your mentality shifts and you go into vacation mode a week or two before you leave. By the time you come home, all that motivation will be gone and you will likely find yourself in the same situation next year. Stack another event 4-8 weeks away from the beach vacation. That way you will need to stay in shape and continue to make progress and still enjoy the vacation. The stacking can take a number of forms. I personally likely entering Crossfit competitions or obstacle course races.
Investing in change doesn’t necessarily have to be a monetary investment, but it sure does help. Neither Peloton nor Crossfit are cheap, but they are effective. People are much less likely to waste their membership in either. If you don’t have the money to invest, then you have to do it with time. Spend time reading about how to accomplish what you want to accomplish by people similar to you. Write out your own plan and then test it. Over time you will learn what works and what doesn’t and this time investment will be just as real as a money investment.
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