Good morning everyone and welcome back to the Breakroom!
I hope this week has gone as smoothly for all of you as it has for me! Work has actually been pretty uneventful in the sense that it has been calm with no major headaches. This next week will be pretty hectic following some changes behind the scenes but at least we have known about it so we can be ready. The home remodels are going swimmingly and I look forward to seeing the completed work in as little as a couple weeks.
And of course, since this last week we have talked about trying to focus on personal health and wellbeing and trying to celebrate what we have done. I will be honest and say I haven’t gotten on top of the fitness as much as I would like to, although my husband has been so I’m really proud of him! I’m hoping to get back to meal prepping to ensure we are eating properly during the week with lunch time always being the difficult one. But this week has been one in which we have focused on keeping our stress low and taking the time to relax. We have gotten several new video games in the house, including the fact that we started playing a cooperative game called “It Takes Two” which really is interesting because I feel it can truly showcase how in sync two people are. Personally I think we are doing pretty dang good so far, and it is one I would recommend to couples who want to game together. That being said, “Hello Kitty Island Adventure” is also cute and quaint for those who want a leisurely game to play. Our mental health is just as important as our physical health, so I want to continue to focus on managing my stress but I’m still going to use this next week to be more active.
How about all of you? How have you paid extra attention to your physical and/or mental wellbeing this last week? Remember that even a small victory should be celebrated and it should be noted that it really can be a lot of work just to achieve those small ones, which is why they are so important. Feel free to comment with your personal victories!
So what has happened in the last week at the office?
Well, evidently all of the offices under Dunder Mifflin have been doing so poorly with the weight loss challenge that corporate has actually chosen to increase the vacation prize to five days from the previously three.
You might be wondering why a company would be so adamant about such an initiative to encourage their staff to lose weight. Such events and initiatives to support employee wellbeing have become quite popular for a multitude of reasons. For starters, by encouraging employees to be physically healthy they are a lot less likely to need to take excess sick time off work. Just because a company offers sick time for employees, doesn’t mean that they would love it if we never got ill and had to call in last moment. When it comes to our mental health and wellbeing, a big part of it is to quite simply keep us happy in our professional and personal lives. When you’re unhappy you might be eager to find change, or develop burnout at work if your career becomes the primary source of your stress. If one can find no problem with your job or place of work, it becomes that much harder to choose to leave them because you have this connection. Similarly, a company who offers benefits that include plans tied to health and wellbeing become pretty coveted and it isn’t easy to have to give up those incentives to go to a new position. Do our employers actually care about out wellbeing? It is certainly possible because not every large company is ran by supervillains with too much money. But obviously, they are certainly going to accept the reward that in exchange for such benefits, their employees have a much greater retention factor. Finally, as I mentioned last week there is the fact that this weight loss event has an added benefit of fueling comradery at each branch, plus some health competition in wanting to defeat the others.
Now this office is filled with quite a few competitive people, and I happen to be one of them so these competitions can get fierce. I might not be competitive with every aspect in my life, but when it comes to games or contests I can take it pretty seriously. In our office we have people like Creed who measures out rice for each meal and Kelly who is eating next to nothing. And then we have Dwight who decides he is not the the problem, but he knows who is. First, he quite rudely decides to select “random” people to go out and get liposuction surgery (he chose Kevin, Phyllis, and Stanley). He then tries to apologize to Phyllis by taking her on a joint sales call, but all he did was drive her miles away and leave her stranded with no phone or purse. He thought he was being a hero because he forced her to burn a great deal of calories by having to walk back. He disagreed, and that is also how David Wallace felt about the situation when she called. For the record, not sure why she chose to call the CFO about this issue as, if anything, this should’ve gone to Human Resources. This was also the moment that Kelly fainted at her desk because of her lack of eating.
This prompted corporate to step in and try to reiterate that this competition was not to get people to starve themselves but to actually get healthy. Now I am not a nutritionist and this is not a blog about nutrition since I am not qualified to talk about such things (neither or most of the “influencers” out there). But I feel I can explain to everyone that you should be starving yourself because this is not healthy for anyone. For most diets, it might require you to reduce your overall caloric intake each day but this is typically done gradually and still requires you to be eating balanced meals. Do not starve yourself, knowingly ingest a tapeworm, and be weary of any fad diet. Instead, focus on eating healthy, sticking to proper moderation, try to work out, and if you need the extra help to formulate a diet, reach out to a professional on the matter.
As for Dunder Mifflin, they are trying to encourage us to find satisfaction in who we are; going the extra mile is our own, Michael Scott. With a partially inflated sumo suit underneath his clothes, he comes in as “Michael Klump” to promote body positivity. It is possible to want to lose some weight but still be happy in your own skin. It is having such a poor opinion of your body and weight that can lead us to making such poor decisions about our health. This is why it is so important to also think about your mental wellbeing alongside your physical, and the two really should be treated as connected. Michael actually encourages us to say positive things about Kelly to remind her that she is already beautiful.
Just when I thought this was the end of the competition, we got one final surprise. While it is being decided that Utica is the victor, Michael and Holly announce that if we can lose 8 pounds by the end of the day, we can still win. In their defense, I truly believe that they do support body positivity. I just think that they support winning more; as a competitive person, I can see where they are coming from. Michael insists everyone stop eating and Andy tries to crank up the heat to turn the place into a sweat lodge. Personally, I thought we could sneak a win by switching to lighter clothes in order to trick the scale. I suppose it didn’t help that when Jim showed up from his client meeting he was soaking wet from the rain. Never seen anyone look so happy while drenched in rain.
In the end we didn’t win, but I knew it would be a longshot to lose 8 pounds by the end of the work day. Brightside, most people lost a bit of weight so we did succeed in the end and that is what counts. Unless you are able to win, because then that is what counts.
And that was the conclusion to our weight loss competition! I hope everyone is able to find some time to focus on their personal wellbeing this next week, and please share how you do so.
Until next time, I’ll see you around the Breakroom!
