Write people, when I first read this thread, I was quite confused and angry and thought that SW should tell us why these criteria in place and see if we could understand it, so I emailed them with a link to the thread and thought I would never get a reply...............but this morning I recieved this:
Thank you for getting in touch with me about the Minimins site. I’m really glad you’ve let me know about the confusion our criteria has caused on the forum, and very happy to explain further.
We hope that all our competitions will inspire and motivate our members - the last thing we’d ever want to do is leave anyone feeling undervalued or discounted. The fact that one of our competitions has left a member feeling upset concerns me greatly.
We have criteria in all of our competitions, and they’re in place because it’s necessary to have some kind of system for entering – it really wouldn’t be fair or sensible to run competitions with no entry criteria at all – we could have thousands of members entering! Having criteria is a more up-front and kind way of operating our competitions, especially for members, as without them we could potentially be setting entrants up for failure. We’ve spent a lot of time, over the years, setting criteria which we think are fair and realistic – for women, the upper entry criteria is set at a stone over a BMI of 25 (which is the Department of Health guide to a healthy weight). Given that we have criteria in place, we do have to stick to them – while I do completely understand that being out of criteria after an amazing weight loss of 6 stone may seem difficult to understand, if we started to ‘tweak’ the criteria, we’d then be being unfair to other people who could have entered – it becomes a slippery slope.
Although the lady that you mention isn’t eligible to continue to the District and National competition, her fantastic achievement should have been celebrated with bells and whistles in group. We believe that this stage – celebrating a fabulous winner in every single group – is the most important part of every Slimming World competition: knowing how proud her Consultant and fellow group members are, being nominated and voted for by them, and celebrating together. We know members don’t join Slimming World to win a competition, they join to lose weight and lead a healthier, fitter, longer life. However we also know how important it is that we help to manage their expectations about the competitions, and we do ask Consultants to let nominees and winning members – along with the other voting members - know about our criteria for continuing to the District finals.
I know this won’t change the disappointment your forum friend will be feeling right now, but I hope this clarifies our process and the reasons for having the competition criteria in place. I’d be very happy for you to pass this message on to your fellow members of the forum to help them understand this too – it would be such a shame for this issue to cloud anyone’s excitement and enthusiasm for their own weight loss journey.
Very best wishes for your continued success, Victoria, and thank you once again for getting in touch.
Catherine
Catherine Fox
Assistant Marketing Manager
Thought it was quite good that I got a reply!!!