Most of us have good intentions where it comes to eating healthfully and exercising, but we don’t always follow through. But thanks to a fascinating new app called Pact, you can raise the stakes and hold yourself accountable — as in, financially accountable — for your habits. Whoa.
Download the free Pact app and link it to your PayPal account or a credit card. Then set up your “pact” with the community: Choose from fruits and vegetables, working out, or keeping a food log. Or try all three, if you’re feeling super motivated. If you fulfill your pact, you earn money. If you flake out, you lose money.
As in, real money. Intrigued?
For food logging, Pact connects with My Fitness Pal and imports your food diary. Likewise, for workout tracking Pact connects with several different fitness tracking apps, including Jawbone UP, FitBit Flex, RunKeeper, and MapMyFitness with varying requirements for your workout to count; like with a Jawbone UP or FitBit Flex, you need to hit 10,000 steps.
You can also use the Pact motion tracker to log a workout, or check in at your gym. However, you can’t import a GPS file from a Garmin to your MapMyFitness account and have it count toward your pact. That was disappointing to me, since I use mine instead of running GPS in the background on my phone, which can drain the battery quickly.
As for the fruits and veggies pact, upload a photo of your serving on your plate before you chow down, and the Pact community will vote on whether your fruit or veggie counts toward your pact. So yes, you’re putting your financial outcome in the hands of strangers–although just six votes is enough to approve your fruit or veggie. Some people are sticklers, like me: I give the side-eye to baked potatoes and canned fruit when I vote. But the community at large is pretty flexible.
Can you cheat? Kind of, I suppose. You could take a picture of your friend’s salad, and then bite into a bacon cheeseburger. You could coax other people into wearing your activity tracker. You could copy meal plans into a fabricated food log. But that seems like a lot of extra effort, for what may amount to a few dollars. Besides, if you’re the type whose losing money on this right and left, it’s probably not the right app for you.
You may be also wondering where the money comes from. Well, when you fulfill your pact, you get paid from the proceeds of others who didn’t complete their pacts. Which is a little weird when you think of it, because you kind of have financial motivation for other people to fail. Fortunately the community doesn’t seem to behave that way.
To be clear, the Pact app will hardly make you rich. I’ve been using it for several weeks, logging five workouts and 12 fruits and vegetables a week–and I haven’t made $10 yet. It’s the penalties of not fulfilling your pacts that that are the real motivators here. Each uneaten fruit or veg will cost you $5, and each missed workout or food log will cost you $10.
That’s pretty steep, even for those of us who eat healthy and exercise regularly already.
But hey, if you’re the super competitive type, or your health is such that you’re willing to take some financial risks to establish new habits rather urgently, then Pact may be worth a try to help you get your butt in gear. Literally.
Download Pact for iOS on the App Store and for Android on Google Play. The app is free, but the penalties and rewards sure aren’t.
