A dieting app is paying influencers to promote weight-loss contests. Their followers were never told the app was profiting from their insecurities.

"I needed to lose weight to be healthy, but I didn't need to lose weight to love myself," Jordan wrote in a post in December 2017. "You can practice self-love at any stage in your journey."

In the same post, Jordan offered her followers an opportunity to kick-start their own weight loss: placing a "bet" on a weight-wagering app called DietBet.

DietBet works with influencers to host and promote challenges that usually encourage followers to lose 4% of their body weight in 28 days. First launched in 2013 under the weight-loss website WayBetter, the app says it's attracted more than 1 million "players." It holds a 4.8-star rating (out of five stars) on Apple's app store, and it has over 100,000 downloads in the Google Play store.

DietBet's simplest game format, known as a "kickstarter," requires users to pay into a collective pot to enter — typically $35 to $100. Those who shed the weight split the pot, and those who fail lose their contribution. The company says it generally takes 25% of the pot as a fee before making payouts.

But DietBet isn't sharing a key piece of information about the influencers who work with the app: They're quietly profiting from their followers' participation.

In contracts, recruitment emails, and influencer guides viewed by Insider, DietBet told weight-loss influencers that in exchange for acting as a celebrity "host," posting promotional content encouraging their followers to sign up, they'd receive a share of DietBet's cut of the pot. But the app never encouraged them to disclose that relationship, whether by using an #ad or #sponsored hashtag or a paid-partnership tag at the top of the post.

Concerns about the transparency of influencer marketing have existed for many years among consumers, who expect honesty from the brands they follow on social media. But such concerns become more complicated when a person's health — physical or mental — is on the line.

Several former DietBet influencers told Insider they're concerned that the app is exploiting and deceiving followers, both through its overall business model and the way it works with influencers. And a law professor says that by failing to disclose their financial relationship, both the company and its influencer "hosts" are likely breaking the law.

On top of that, a registered dietitian told Insider the app's focus on rapid weight loss pushes people to lose too much weight too quickly. And some people have said DietBet games either caused or resurfaced their issues with disordered eating — often when they were already at what's considered a healthy body-mass index.

That group included Jordan. In 2019, she told her followers in a YouTube video that she'd developed body dysmorphia and entered "a vicious cycle of restricting and binging that lasted over a year and a half."

Hosting and taking part in DietBet challenges at the time "did more damage than good," Jordan told Insider via email, adding that her paid partnership with the platform "exacerbated" her eating issues. Ultimately, she decided to quit hosting.

"My personal relationship with the scale was actually one of the reasons why I stopped hosting games," said Jordan, who doesn't use her last name online because of concerns about harassment, but whose identity is known to Insider. "I didn't like the ethics of hosting something so scale-focused when I was struggling with the scale myself."

DietBet and its influencer hosts often aren't transparent about their financial relationship

DietBet's early years of operation were relatively quiet. The platform earned mentions as a weight-loss tool from the likes of USA Today and Men's Journal. But in 2019, it plunged into controversy around one of its biggest influencer hosts, Lexi Reed.

Under the handle @fatgirlfedup, Reed has drawn 1.1 million followers on Instagram with discussions of her weight-loss journey. She's been a paid host on DietBet since 2016, recruiting more than 229,000 players, according to the platform's website.

In December 2019, DietBet said in an Instagram statement that it had received negative feedback from its users regarding Reed. The company did not discuss the nature of the complaints, but it appears that Reed's failure to acknowledge her paid partnership with the app to followers was part of the story.

In her own Instagram statement, Reed promised to disclose her paid partnership with DietBet in all posts moving forward, and to post motivational content at least four times a week during her games. (Asked about the terms the company had set to continue working with Reed after receiving complaints, a company spokesperson said only that the app had asked her to meet "new requirements based on best practices for engagement." Reed did not respond to a request for comment.)

Reed continued to host DietBet games until January 2022; she's since been on hiatus because of a serious illness. But while she became more open about her financial relationship with DietBet, other influencers haven't clearly disclosed theirs — and DietBet doesn't appear to be asking them to do so.

In a 2022 contract with a now former DietBet influencer that was viewed by Insider, DietBet's parent company, WayBetter, didn't specify a need to disclose that the influencer's posts are paid advertising.

A copy of WayBetter's 2022 guide for influencers promoting DietBet contests also didn't mention disclosure. The guide features several sample Instagram posts from influencers, all of which lack an #ad or #sponsored hashtag or a paid-partnership tag. One sample post says "partnered with @dietbet" in its caption, but doesn't include the word "ad."

The company did not respond to a question from Insider about whether it gives influencers any guidelines for disclosing their financial relationship.

A current DietBet influencer, who requested anonymity so as not to jeopardize her working relationship with WayBetter, said she thinks many influencers may not be disclosing their profits from DietBet games because the financial relationship is a well-known fact in the online weight-loss community. Thanks to big names like Reed, influencers' profiting off games "is kind of just a DietBet known," she said.

But Catalina Goanta, a professor of law at Utrecht University who focuses on the impact of content monetization on social media, told Insider that both DietBet and its influencer hosts are likely breaking US law by not disclosing their financial relationship.

Guidelines from the Federal Trade Commission, the body that enforces consumer-protection laws in the US, prohibit deceptive trade practices, which can include omitting information in a way that's likely to mislead customers.

"Although it is often considered a gray area, influencer marketing does not bring any new challenges to advertising rules, because the principle remains the same: Just don't lie to people," Goanta told Insider, adding that influencers' "not telling people that they make money off their back is the textbook definition of a deceptive practice."

She described the single appearance of "partnered with @dietbet" in the promotional guide for influencers as insufficient. "The fact that this sample is sent to influencers means nothing if the company doesn't pursue active means to make sure influencers actually disclose the collaboration," she said.

A dietitian says DietBet's model for weight loss is ineffective at best and dangerous at worst

In addition to affecting influencer hosts, DietBet's challenges have had consequences for followers with histories of disordered eating.

In 2017, Stefanie Scaretta, a 39-year-old nurse from Connecticut, took part in a four-week DietBet challenge hosted by a fitness influencer known as Shaun T.

Just before she started the challenge, Scaretta was 5-foot-5 and weighed 118 pounds, putting her BMI at 19.6, which a calculator from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests is a "healthy weight."

Scaretta told Insider she wanted to take part in the challenge for fitness reasons. She recalled "always wanting to push myself to the limit," and she thought it would be a way to prove her willpower when it came to physical activity.

During the challenge, Scaretta said, she restricted her food intake to around 1,100 or 1,200 calories a day and burned 800 calories a day through exercise. The US Department of Agriculture's MyPlate Plan calculator suggests a person of Scaretta's sex, height, and weight should have been consuming 2,000 calories a day to maintain their weight.

By the end of the four weeks, Scaretta weighed 111 pounds, putting her BMI at 18.5, which the CDC places at the cusp of "underweight."

After the game ended, Scaretta was desperate to stay at the lower weight, so she underate and tried to eat only healthy food, she said.

When she started gaining weight back anyway, she "felt like a failure," she said. "The whole point of the game is that if you lose weight you've succeeded, and if you gain any you fail."

Scaretta told Insider the DietBet challenge triggered a worsening relationship with food. After Scaretta took part in the challenge, her therapist diagnosed her with orthorexia, or an obsession with eating "pure" or healthy food.

DietBet's website says the platform disqualifies users from entering competitions if a successful result would leave them under what the CDC considers a healthy BMI. But that still allows users like Scaretta, who are at the lowest end of "healthy weight," to slip through.

DietBet also limits the weight loss permitted in a single kickstarter game to 12% of a user's body weight. Scaretta lost 5.93% of her body weight, meaning the platform didn't consider her weight loss "unhealthy."

Scaretta disagrees. "It is in no way a healthy way to promote weight loss," she said.

The CDC suggests healthy weight loss amounts to shedding 1 or 2 pounds a week. Alix Turoff, a registered dietitian, described DietBet's 4% weight-loss target as an "aggressive goal."

"It is on the higher end of what most people will lose, especially if they're starting at a lower body weight," Turoff said.

A DietBet representative contested Turoff's appraisal, citing two peer-reviewed studies that showcased the app's effectiveness in helping people lose weight. But Turoff noted that neither study addressed concerns about people losing too much weight too quickly.

Turoff also expressed concern about DietBet's metrics-based approach to weight loss, especially its emphasis on BMI. Many people with higher BMIs can have eating disorders, she said. And she never tells clients to lose a set amount of weight in a certain time frame, as that emphasizes the scale over building healthier habits.

"I don't like that weight is the only metric that they seem to be focusing on," Turoff said. She said the 28-day time frame for challenges is unlikely to help participants develop sustainable habits like drinking more water or cooking instead of eating out. Instead, it may encourage them to take more extreme measures to drop pounds.

Some people on eating-disorder-support forums have described using the platform to aid their weight loss and earn extra cash. "Obviously I won cause I just restrict," one person wrote. "I won an extra $25." Another discussed potentially using the app as a lucrative "side gig."

"We take eating disorders and unhealthy weight-loss practices very seriously," a DietBet representative told Insider, citing the low-BMI and weight-loss-percentage guardrails that Scaretta was able to slip past, as well as the app's requirements that players be over 18 and not play more than three games simultaneously. "If we ever discover that someone is using our product for unhealthy reasons, we will refund them and remove them from games."

Influencers are beginning to distance themselves from the app — but it's still thriving, and many continue to make money from it

Despite the blowback from some influencers, DietBet remains popular. Searching #dietbet on Instagram or TikTok yields hundreds of recent posts from users who are promoting games or sharing results and positive testimonies about taking part in weight-loss challenges on the platform.

Some influencers did part ways with DietBet after the controversy over Lexi Reed's posts.

John Glaude, a fitness influencer known as ObesetoBeast, had hosted a handful of DietBet games for his 749,000 YouTube subscribers. But in a video posted in December 2019, he said he'd ceased working with the platform because of concerns about a lack of transparency around influencer pay.

"I think it's important that you make money doing what you love, but I think that it is also very important that you disclose that fact," Glaude said in the video. "That's one of the things I noticed, and that really soured me on DietBet, is they never really make you say, 'Hey, I'm making money off this.'"

(In a January 2017 Instagram post promoting a DietBet game he was hosting, Glaude did not disclose that the post was an ad or a paid partnership. He did not respond to a request for comment.)

Johnna Rose, a weight-loss influencer with about 35,000 followers, earned 10% of the prize pot for every DietBet game she posted, according to a contract viewed by Insider.

But she said she chose to stop working with the platform because of the controversy around Reed and because she thought it was unfair that influencers could collect money from other people's weight loss, even if they didn't participate in their own games.

"I used to love participating and all of that," she told Insider. "But it got so fake that it wasn't worth it anymore."