Virtual pain can yield real-world gain

Globe Staff

Put your avatar on a virtual health kick, and there's a possibility that you too could lose weight in the real world.

Such is the tantalizing promise of Club One Island, a virtual health world created with the goal of changing people's behavior in positive ways. Club One Island is the brainchild of Club One, a network of California fitness clubs. The company sees Club One Island not only as a way to empower and inspire overweight folks to address their obesity but also as a potential product that it can sell to health care companies.

At the Games for Health Conference in Boston this week, Club One unveiled some results from its virtual health world pilot program. According to a Club One press release, some participants in the study lost up to 20 pounds in three months. During that period, participants were asked to log four one-hour sessions per week at Club One Island, which is currently based in Second Life, a popular online virtual world.

"Activities and interactions on Club One Island center on reframing how people think about weight loss," said the release, which added that preliminary results suggest that a virtual fitness program is more likely to motivate behavior changes than a real-world pep talk.

One intriguing component of this self-improving virtual world is the "Room of Doom," where, Club One said, people are "encouraged to combat their emotion-driven eating with a virtual hammer that smashes junk food."