If you're treating that as their primary function, you're just throwing away money, tons of money.

If you decide you want to work out and eat right, take responsibility for it and truly make the personal choice. Or buy a couple of self-help books to learn some techniques. E.g. The Power of Habit. It'll be orders of magnitude cheaper.

This argument is a bit self defeating. You can easily replace the information a personal trainer gives with a standard training program and YouTube videos that show proper exercise form. You cannot easily replace its willpower function with a book.

That doesn't work for most people, so they put money on the line.

A regular personal trainer at a top gym is $12k/year. That’s not that much. It’s approx $23k pre-tax which isn’t a game changer tbh.

You do realize that for an average American that’s half of their annual income?

But we aren’t average are we, Bruce?

I worked as a GMAT/GRE tutor for a while. The same was true in that field.