Julia stepped on the scale, and winced. "Fuck," she whispered to herself. Despite three months of on-again, off-again dieting and exercise to try to get ready for bathing suit season, she weight exactly three pounds more on the first of April than she had at the beginning of the year.
At that moment her roommate Allison walked by the open bathroom door. She was amused to have caught her roommate naked (Julia never wore a stitch of clothing when stepping on the scale, to keep the reading to its absolute minimum).
"Fuck?" Allison joked, smiling at Julia.
Julia reached for her towel wrapped it around herself, stepping off the scale. "Yeah, as in 'Fuck this new diet.'"
Allison shrugged, "Well, at least you won't have to keep eating kale."
Julia muttered, "Its not the diet, its me. I have no willpower."
Not one to allow self-pity, Allison said. "Come on Julia, you have loads of willpower. You just need a different approach. I'll bet I can help you lose whatever amount of weight you want to, and I can help you keep it off for good."
"Oh now you're a personal trainer?" Julia asked, derisively.
"Nope, just a lowly website developer," Allison replied. "But I watched a motivational talk last week by this guy who claimed that you could achieve anything within your physical and intellectual power just by setting up the right reward and punishment system. It was a great talk. The guy who gave it used to be a pack-a-day smoker and had a big beer gut, but one year after his aha moment he ran a 100 mile race! Day by day, week by week, he made himself into an ultra-marathoner in less than a year."
"Well good for him," Julia said, dejectedly. "I guess he had more willpower than me."
"No!" Allison said, "That's just it. He didn't count on willpower. He'd tried to quit smoking and lose weight for years. He was this successful multimillionaire business guy, who had been a real prodigy in the tech startup world, but he simply couldn't control those bad personal habits. So one day, as he was starting up his third software company, he realized that his aptitude for business might be able to help him with his failures in eating and smoking. And he came up with a plan to link them together. He put all of his ownership shares, forty percent of the new company, into an irrevocable trust, with the contractual stipulation that if he did not quit smoking, lose twenty five pounds, and complete an ultra-marathon by the end of one year, those shares would be signed over to his two co-investors. If he did succeed, his co-investors agreed to give him two percent of their shares as a bonus. It put him in a position where if he didn't stick to his plan, he would lose real money, and if he did stick to his plan, there was a real business payoff. And that was something he knew how to manage."
"I see," Julia said. "So all I need is a company to wager away and I can lose weight by my July 4th beach trip?"
"Well, something like that" Allison said, encouragingly, "What if I make up a contract with you. We'll make it so that you succeed you get to squeeze into that teeny bikini. And if you lose, it will be more unpleasant than you'd want. And lets even put in a bonus. Let's tie your success to not only getting thin, but also getting something else you really want: that new Acura. What if I give you the down-payment for that Acura if you achieve your goal of losing, what, fifteen pounds by July?"
"I need to lose more like twenty pounds," Julia replied.
"OK fine. We have ten weeks until your vacation. At the end of each week, we'll do a weigh-in. If you weigh at least two pounds less each week than the week before, you'll be on track to achieve your goal."
"Sounds perfect," Julia said. "And just like what I've been trying to do for three months!" And my motivation is to get the down payment for the Acura? Even though we both know that you don't have that kind of money, right?"
"Well, not yet, I don't," Allison replied, "but let's make that my problem. The reward, though, is only half of the motivation, Julia. We also have to have a penalty for failing to meet your goal. This business guy said that the threat of losing his shares was far and away the biggest factor in his success."
"What kind of penalty?" Julia asked, suspiciously.
Allison thought for a moment and then had an inspiration. "Well, I'd say the thing you seem to fear most at the moment is showing off your body. You've become a little ashamed of your body lately, haven't you."
Julia looked down at her towel, then back up at Allison. "Yeah, I suppose that's true. So?"
"Well its not good. It used to be that you strutted around here all the time in revealing clothes β and sometimes none at all β especially when you thought Bruce might be around to catch a peek. Lately you've been dressing like you have something to hide."
Julia pouted a little, acknowledging tacitly Allison's complaint. She knew that her boyfriend Bruce would be the first to agree that she had become considerably more bashful about her body lately.
"Well, I propose a little exposure as the penalty." Allison continued. "I'm going to whip up an anonymous fee-based web site and post to it weekly. At each weekly weighing, starting with one today, I'll make a video recording of you weighing yourself, in the buff, just like you usually do. If you fail to meet your target, I post the video. Also, you will have to suffer a punishment of my choosing, and I'm going to record that too, while you're still naked. I'll post both the video of your naked weighing and the video recording of your punishment on a private web site. I won't make it public or let anyone know your identity, but I will sell memberships to this site that will help us get the down payment for the car."
Julia was wide eyed. "Oh my God Allison, you've lost your mind!" But she seemed intrigued, and encouraged Allison to continue. "And what if I meet my goal each week?"