Blue Cross, Blue Shield employees shed 2.80% of their total weight since Memorial Day

Three months and more than 37,000 pounds later, The Biggest Loser Summer Challenge has a winner: Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota and its employees, who lost more than 3,780 pounds or 2.80 percent of their total weight in pounds per employee since Memorial Day. Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota also accumulated the greatest average minutes of exercise. UnitedHealth Group won a separate competition for engaging in healthy nutrition practices.

“The Biggest Loser Summer Challenge was the Alliance for a Healthier Minnesota's first high-profile initiative”

Cargill, General Mills, HealthPartners, Medtronic, and Target also competed in the Biggest Loser Summer Challenge - organized by The Alliance for a Healthier Minnesota and powered by RedBrick Health and its online health engagement and social networking technology.

More than 10,000 employees participated in the challenge, exercising more than 16.5 million minutes - the equivalent of walking around the earth 33 times. Participants also tracked their healthy eating practices, notably improving their nutritional choices as the competition progressed.

Final Biggest Loser Summer Challenge standings are available at www.competeforhealth.org. A donation of $25,000 was made to the Second Harvest Heartland food bank in the name of the winning companies.

"The Biggest Loser Summer Challenge at Cargill brought together groups of employees who encouraged and motivated each other throughout the competition," said Beth Zenisek, Wellness Specialist, HR Benefits at Cargill. "Cargill encourages employees to take personal responsibility for their health, and if the challenge influenced employees for the better, that is success in my eyes. Tracking the company and team leaderboards on the RedBrick challenge site was a reminder to keep up with your healthy habits - no one wanted to get bumped back in the competition!"

"I loved the fact that I could track our team standing within the company," said one Cargill employee who participated in The Biggest Loser Summer Challenge. "I think that kept a lot of us motivated as we stayed in the top 30 for most of the challenge. There were more than 100 teams at Cargill, so I feel we did a fantastic job! The tracking kept me accountable, and I liked charting my progression. It kept me motivated to try and do better each week. It didn't always happen, but at least I was aware and tried."

RedBrick Health's social competition technology used in the Biggest Loser Summer Challenge allowed participating organizations and their employees to:

• Quickly and easily form teams online within each company
• Access social gaming elements including leaderboards and message boards
• Earn team status awards along the way to keep the contest fun and fresh
• Track and graph weight loss, minutes of physical activity and points for healthy nutrition practices
• View team progress and standings both within and across companies
• Use web-enabled mobile phones to report weight measures during the competition

"The Biggest Loser Summer Challenge was the Alliance for a Healthier Minnesota's first high-profile initiative," said Rick Kupchella, founding partner of The Alliance for a Healthier Minnesota. "Based on the feedback and results, we consider it a resounding success. We're already working with RedBrick Health to plan our next statewide healthy competition, which we plan to open up to more organizations across Minnesota."

"Without RedBrick Health's online health engagement and social networking technology, it would have been tremendously difficult to pull off the Biggest Loser Summer Challenge," added Kupchella. "We appreciate the role they played in helping make our vision a reality."

"Our health engagement technology and social competition engine provides a turnkey solution for employer coalitions and other groups looking to use a social gaming framework to drive broad-based consumer engagement and create a culture of health," said Kyle Rolfing, chief executive officer for RedBrick Health. "We're extremely proud to have helped power this groundbreaking competition. We look forward to the continued opportunity to work with the Alliance and its growing roster of partners on future initiatives that tap the power of workplace social networks to create a visible and meaningful impact on health."

Source: RedBrick Health