Lose Weight at Work

How to Lose Weight at Work

I’m always looking around for ideas that can help my clients reach their weight loss and fitness goals and ran across an article about a woman by the name of Judy Nowack who won around $150 from her office’s “Biggest Loser at Work” contest by losing 58 pounds.

For her initial weight loss she adopted some new habits and she was inspired to keep going. Nine months later she weighed 168 pounds. When she started she weighed 333 pounds.

WHY NOT YOU! (See Bob Harpers inspirational video below.)

What she learned from the Biggest Loser Club was good eating habits, exercise she could perform and could fit into her daily schedule.

Judy Nowack is a shining example of what a person can accomplish with the right tools and the right motivation.

Biggest Loser Competition at Work

Organizing a Biggest Loser competition at work isn’t something that interests everybody and our Weight Loss Competition is set up so you, as an individual, can join and receive all the benefits of professional guidance without having to weigh-in publicly with your co-workers.

For a nifty style of scale that tracks your progress using an online program look at this WiFi online weight scale.

But for other people having an organized competition is just what they need to get jump started onto a healthy weight loss journey. Forming teams, strategizing your fitness times and planning meals together can be fun and inspiring. There is nothing like a competitive edge to get you involved in your own health and fitness.

Just as an aside, and somewhat related, I had a group of clients that would do meal sharing so they could help one another eat healthfully and were able to split up the work that way.

How to Start a Weight Loss Competition at Work
Looks like you are it. Congratulations on taking the initiative to put this together. It’s not too tough just takes a little bit of organization.

Get together with the other players and come up with some good weight loss team names.

You can either do this on your own following a similar fashion to “The Biggest Loser” or you may chose to join our “Weight Loss Challenge”

And don’t worry, you certainly don’t have to but we do have a ton of great tools that are very useful for just such a competition.

Don’t forget you have to come up with some great weight loss challenge ideas too.

Biggest Loser Rules for Work
The work rules are entirely up to you but to get you started, here are a couple of suggestions – feel free to change or add where you see fit.

==>> Grab a copy of our Weight Loss Challenge Rules

Perhaps as you get the teams involved you can all put your heads together to come up with some challenge ideas designed specifically for your work environment.

Decide how you want to select your teams. People can either put their own teams together or you can appoint captains and randomly assign people to a team.

Post flyers in your building, send out emails, get the boss involved too.

Teams need to have ONE captain who is responsible to record their teams weights and goal achievements each week.

So this means you need a set of scales.

Of course there are some people who would very much like to keep their weight private, so have respect for that. The scales can be in a corner of a room and no one else but the captain needs to see the numbers on the scale.

Uploading the individual weights each week can be really fun because now the percent lost by each team, each week is on the website so you can compare how everyone is doing and who’s winning.

When is all this going to happen? Pick a date that will allow you at least two months (three would be better) so try and pick an 8 to 12 week cycle that doesn’t have any big holidays like Christmas/New Year or summer holidays.

You might want to document the whole journey, with photographs, weekly newsletter, post in the coffee room how the teams are doing. This would be a great place to put your “Weight Loss Challenge” spreadsheet.

Winning the Challenge
Whether or not you want to involve money is up to you or the group. Sometimes a monetary incentive is a great addition.

Some things that could cost your Weight Loss Club money are:

1. You can charge a fee to join a group or make it a groups responsibility to raise so much money before they can compete.
2. Each week the losers might have to sweeten the pot by the amount they lost by to increase the winners pot that much more.
3. Maybe do this all for charity? You could make it that each team has to raise $1000 by getting sponsors or having car washes, raffling t-shirts or whatever. And the winning team gets to pick the charity.

You can have non-monetary incentives as well. For example, that weeks winner is chauffeured to and from work each day -they get picked up at their door and don’t have to participate as a driver in the car-pool for the entire week.

If you have more ideas on how to start a biggest loser challenge at work I would really enjoy hearing about them.

Just enter your thoughts and ideas below.