Putting money where your mouth is: Betting on weight loss.

Anytime we find a new weight loss idea — one with some merit and based in health — we’ll share it with you. This one’s verrrrrry interesting, courtesy of MSN.com Health & Fitness:

Diet bets are popping up everywhere — online, in gyms, at weight-loss classes, and as informal wagers among friends, spouses, and coworkers. They’re big because they work.

A multicenter study of 57 dieters found those who stood to lose money if they didn’t succeed in shedding weight were about five times as likely to reach their goal as those with no financial stake in the outcome. Half of the bettors dropped 16 pounds in 16 weeks, compared with just 10.5 percent of the no-wager group.

And in a study of more than 200 dieters at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, those who were told they’d pocket $14 for every 1 percent of body weight they shed were nearly five and a half times as likely to take off 5 percent of their body weight as participants not offered cash.

Putting money, ego, and bragging rights on the line is a potent formula for keeping up your motivation. “If eating chocolate cake tonight means you’ll lose $10 or $50 at your next weigh-in, dessert suddenly isn’t very attractive,” notes Dean Karlan, Ph.D., a Yale University behavioral economist. After losing 40 pounds in a personal bet with a friend, Karlan went on to found stickk.com, one of the first online weight-loss betting sites. “When there’s something big at stake, you can’t say, ‘Oh, I’ll eat less next week. I’ll work out longer tomorrow.’ You have to stay on track all the time, because doing the wrong thing would be very expensive.”

Wagering on weight loss might even set off feel-good fireworks in the brain. In brain-scan studies at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard researchers found that gambling lit up the same little gray cells activated by morphine and cocaine.

Then there’s the accountability factor. “Checking in with somebody every week is definitely going to help you stay on course,” says New York City diet expert and registered dietitian Elisa Zied, M.S., R.D. “It’s competitive in a playful way.”

Here’s the full article at MSN.com.

What makes the concept even more appealing is that it works with virtually any weight loss plan — just a little somethin’, you know, to keep it interesting.

But we want to know what you think — is betting on weight loss something that might work for you?