You might have heard the saying many times ‘a resolution is good for only three days’. When you start planning to take a new course or to start exercising, your mind always sprints for success. However, the motivation doesn’t last for more than 3 days. Going on a diet is the same. There are many people who go on a diet but there are not many who succeed. According to Sean McCrea, who majored in a psychology at Konstantz University in Germany, people don’t often make specific plans to lose weight. One characteristic of people who procrastinate is that they make an abstract plan that is too lofty or difficult to have a chance of succeeding. However, if you rely on the support of others, get motivated, and make specific plans, don’t you think you might have a better chance of accomplishing your goals?

With this in mind, a new group diet start-up club is planning to open for Gachon University students. To start, participants need to agree to have their personal information collected through a questionnaire and submit their height, and weight, body type, and aspect of their health that they’d like to better control. After the first announcement and interview, the presentation was held on September 13 and 14 with a final announcement.

The program proceeded as follows: a Kakaotalk chat room was made for group with 5 people. 5 people chose the desired group composition with either same sex, mixed sex, friends or random when they filled out the questionnaire. After the grouping of students, each group makes a goal. In the chat room, they share a diet menu and exercises in order to get a high score. This program uses the scoring system to raise their dieting motivation. The group manager gives points to the members if they provide proof according to the conditions, such as menu, types of exercise they have done, and weight loss. For example, if all the group members take a picture of their daily meals and upload it in the Kakaotalk room, 10 points would be given to the team. And there are 10 points per 15 minutes of exercise, 50 points per 1kg loss of weight and -50 points per 1kg gain of weight. For the first 2~3 days, the group manager shares meal ideas and exercises together to help the program progress. Weight and waistline are measured twice every week on Mondays and Thursdays with the group manager. The program formed an alliance with a gym (sports center) which is located near the school to make it usable to participants at low prices. After three weeks of dieting from September 17 to October 8, the overall score is added up to give a small gift to the best and the second-best teams.

Before the program started formally, Lee Ho-Seung, in charge of GSP club and club members did a test run. As a result, almost everyone succeeded in reaching their dieting goals and even improved their health. If they had been on a diet alone, they would have failed, but they were motivated by their team, made specific plans and succeeded on healthy diet. If you think your will is weak and you can’t control yourself well, why don’t you try to work with people like this? Helping, encouraging and motivating each other will provide better results than doing it alone. It’s like the old saying, ‘United we stand, divided we fall’.