SHIFT Newsroom · UK
Game of Stones: two-year results for men’s weight management
UK archive · Original report: May 2026. The UK trial tested supportive texts with and without incentives. Longer follow-up makes the outcome more nuanced than the original cash-reward headline.
UK archive review · 13 September 2026. Original source: May 2026. This article revisits a UK development; it is not a new announcement today.
A programme designed around men
Game of Stones recruited 585 men living with obesity in Belfast, Bristol and Glasgow. Participants were randomly allocated to supportive texts plus financial incentives, texts alone, or a waiting-list group. The financial incentive came from the study; men did not have to risk their own deposit.
The May 2026 NIHR report brings together the trial and its longer follow-up. Its original one-year results had already been reported earlier, so this is not a newly completed trial in September 2026.
The longer view matters
At twelve months, weight loss was greater with texts plus incentives than in the control group. At twenty-four months, the between-group differences were no longer statistically significant. Follow-up reached 64% at that point, and the control group had received a shorter text intervention after its first year.
Those details make a simple claim that paying men produces lasting superior weight loss too strong. Economic modelling also depends on assumptions about what happens after observed follow-up.
Useful design questions for support
Our interest is in how a programme fits people who do not attend conventional groups. What makes contact manageable, what happens when motivation falls, and how is support maintained after the initial period? A useful service needs answers beyond the opening incentive.
This study does not establish that a reader will be paid to lose weight or that the programme is available locally. Nor does it justify comparing its percentages directly with medicine trials involving different participants and follow-up.
Source: Macaulay and colleagues, NIHR Journals Library, Public Health Research 14(10), DOI 10.3310/GJPH0909. The report’s full title and methods are available in the evidence links below.
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Known facts
- The UK trial tested supportive texts with and without incentives. Longer follow-up makes the outcome more nuanced than the original cash-reward headline.