The bloodletting is over. Now what? (My 8 Key Takeaways from the Healthy Wage Yo-Yo Fiasco)

So it ended Friday—Healthy Wage purged all the bad yo-yo wagers, and the wager money was refunded.

They may now move on with their weight loss journeys. All concurrent jackpot challenges—including the $250 High Roller if they’re in it—stay intact, as do all step challenges. All step challenges stay intact. And the purged players can enroll in both of these types of challenges, unfettered, in the future.

So why did this have to happen? Why annul all those wagers, and confuse and enrage a bunch of veteran players? A lot of them referred others to the service to build their prizes up—now they cannot get any benefit from that.

Perhaps some of them have been featured in Healthy Wage advertising. I hope Healthy Wage doesn’t make the mistake of posting on their social media channels the stories of anyone who got cancelled—that can backfire big time when the victims post comments on those threads.

It’s been a big concern with me—especially since I have been an ambassador for the company on social media for over 2 months now. I have been very vocal about my displeasure with the execution of this move, and in particular with the content of the email communicating it.

Most of the other ambassadors have stayed quiet. A number of them believe I need to avoid commenting like this because it fans the flames and makes things worse—as a satisfied customer, I am to spread the word about how great the company is and simply assume that the company is dealing with this situation appropriately.

To be clear, I do support Healthy Wage and I believe they are doing what they feel they must for their company. And the affected players are getting totally refunded, and they can move ahead with their weight loss goals in the ways they see fit. But when I peeled the onion back on this over the last few days, a lot of what was revealed was simply unacceptable to me. And the negative response from most folks online to this, in my view, something Healthy Wage owns and needs to address.

Healthy Wage can recover. Many companies recover from adversity. And now that the emails have ceased, I am going to refrain from further commentary in the Facebook groups I am part of, and meanwhile assist behind the scenes in any way I can to help improve what I think is a really good idea for the future.

In the meantime, I have 8 takeaways from this incident that I would like to document here in my space.

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Here are the takeaways:

(1) Healthy Wage is profit-oriented. Health concerns are also important, but less so than making money.

At the beginning of this, let me emphatically state that I have no issues with a for-profit company trying to make money for its principals. That’s the whole point. We all knew this when we signed up.

In fact, had the company just told these folks that were getting annulled, straight-up, that their “play” was too strong for them and that they fouled up when they offered the opportunity to them, I would have hit “F” for respects! These folks are getting their money returned anyway.

That may have been too much to ask, and I realize that some bullshit is necessary when you’re doing business communications, but this was just too much for me

Ostensibly, the company is protecting against countenance of “unhealthy practices” involving rapid weight fluctuations. This is why they say they had no choice other than issuing the annulments.

But the fact is, anyone can yo-yo and continually monetize that behavior at Healthy Wage. That has always been the case—the jackpot challenges are not restricted by the yo-yo rule.

And they invited the yo-yo people to keep yo-yo’ing with Healthy Wage by playing in jackpot challenges. (More on the cheating aspect of this below.)

Of course, in jackpot challenges you aren’t betting against Healthy Wage—you are betting against other players in the same pools as you. They take 25% of the entry fees, and don’t care who wins or loses. The only thing they care about is that fewer than 75% of the players win, so that the money back guarantee doesn’t eat into the challenge skim.

But in HealthyWagers you are playing against Healthy Wage. And yo-yo wagers can be quite lucrative—the higher starting weight drives up the ROI, and allows for more pounds to be lost which drives up both the ROI and profit ceilings. And the calculator is design for people who haven’t lost weight successfully before.

I assumed when they rolled this out they had already figured out how to profit from it. So this is corrective action.

With regard to health concerns: I believe that healthy weight loss rates should vary from person to person, and it is the player’s responsibility to set up their bets so that they are not overextending themselves.

One person I talked to who got annulled had done a 6-month wager and lost 18% in that time—about 0.78% week-to-week. She then gained back 8% in 3 months, or about 0.6% week-to-week, and enrolled in a jackpot challenge to correct that.

Neither of those rates are extreme. The -0.78% week-to-week change is brisk, but far from batshit crazy—and they have $10,000 team challenges in which all team members must each lose 1.5% week-to-week for 12 weeks in order to get a piece of the big money.

Rising 0.6% week-to-week might betray a lack of control, and I personally think it should lock you out of a yo-yo Healthy Wager, but it’s something that happens to many of us as part of ordinary life in the western world. Nothing really nefarious about it.

(2) Healthy Wage does not deal with cheating as effectively as they could.

If there are cheaters, they need to deal with them in real time, and on a case-by-case basis.

Using the annulment as a way to drive them out is totally unacceptable. The ends do not justify the means. It is especially unacceptable to invite them to continue to compete in jackpot challenges. I consider those to be contaminated at this time and I have to warn people of this situation if they choose to enter.

Before I move on to the next takeaway, let me state this: If you are cheating—and you know who you are—you have everything coming to you if you are caught. And if you were cheating before you got your yo-yo annulment, you should just take your refund and fuck off. You bear your share of responsibility for all the honest players who got annulled.

(3) Healthy Wage does not appear to have sufficient respect for its repeat customers, who are loyal and will do word-to-mouth advertising for them.

In the documentary Super Size Me, where the documentarian Morgan Spurlock went on an all-McDonald’s diet for a month, he revealed that McDonald’s uses the terms “heavy users” and “super heavy users” to describe frequent repeat customers. The people targeted by these annulments might be the Healthy Wage equivalent of these.

These folks really like Healthy Wage and many of them have been advocating for the service, as they have successfully lost excess weight on a HealthyWager. Some of them have been featured by the company in social media advertising. If not, many of them wouldn’t mind being asked.

Probably not anymore. They were invited back in, and a month later they were booted out with their bet money returned. No credible explanation given—just an accusation of “unhealthy” behavior with no evidence. No legitimate chance to appeal—instead, a useless involuntary “automatic appeal” that you even never knew about, much less authorized.

No wonder they’re pissed off. This is the exact group that got victimized by the annulments. Not good treatment of the people who know and love you the most.

(4) Thoughful yo-yo HealthyWagers and maintenance challenges are in order.

I wrote a post about how I might like to see a permanent yo-yo HealthyWager offered. It uses the same calculator as for conventional wagers, but puts restrictions against the more aggressive wagers that are normally available.

It imposes a 3-month waiting period after a successful HealthyWager to cut down on the frequency of yo-yo bets. After the three months expire, a maximum starting weight is imposed, as well as a maximum percentage of pledged weight loss. These are gradually relaxed as time elapses since the weigh-out.

So Healthy Wage can still make money and help people keep their excess weight.

A maintenance jackpot challenge is also in order. I would make it available to anyone who won a HealthyWager and is at 103% or less of their weigh-out weight. They win if they stay within 3% of their weight for 12 weeks.

(5) Anyone on a yo-yo wager that is still active needs to keep honest.

Consider yourself under strict surveillance. They are checking for cheating more strictly for you than for anyone on a conventional wager. It makes sense, because you are experienced and a greater risk to win.

It is what it is. Don’t fuck around on the weigh-out video this summer, or fall or whatever. Follow the rules to the letter. Give the refs no room for questioning anything. (To put it more nicely, make it as easy as possible for them to rubber-stamp your video.)

(6) Anyone in the $250 High Roller jackpot challenge needs to keep honest.

Big-ass money on the line. Again, don’t fuck around on the weigh-in.

Note that the payout will be $250 or more. So the weigh-out weight from this will be the maximum starting weight allowed for a conventional HealthyWager. In other words, the yo-yo rule will block you from launching a new HealthyWager at a higher weight.

I’m in High Roller and I’ll be watching the payout come early April. I believe there’s a small chance the money-back guarantee will be triggered this time—if more than 75% of the players win their bets, Healthy Wage has to pay all winners their full entry fee. This will eat into their normal 25% skim of the entry fees—which is almost $60,000 for this challenge. That’s bad for both Healthy Wage and the winners.

(7) For future jackpot challenges, stay honest—or, know what you’re getting into when you enroll.

Because there might be yo-yo cheaters in them. They were invited to enroll, after all.

(8) No matter what happens, nobody should use this as an excuse for a subsequent failure to lose excess weight.

If you really need to lose weight, you have many good reasons and motivations to do it other than to make money on a weight loss wagering program. Fall back on those and use them. If things don’t work out eventually, don’t blame Healthy Wage for it. It’s all on you.

To be honest, if you end up failing to complete the goal you had set in the annulled pledge, you probably would have failed it even if the wager stayed intact—-and you would have lost your investment.

Healthy Wage for me is just a fun thing to do while I’m losing my excess poundage. If it was to disappear tomorrow, life would go on for me, and I would look back on it with fond memories. But even with this incident I still believe it will be there for us in the future to come.