Portrait of the Author in Repose

The following is a repost from January, 2013:

So it’s the beginning of a new year, and Paul’s employer has teamed up with Virgin HealthMiles to encourage their employees and their families to “Be Healthy”.

What a crock.

You sign up and they send you a pedometer that will track the number of steps that you take each day. According to them, the more steps you take, the more weight you will lose, and the healthier you will be. And if you take enough steps each day, at the end of the year, the company will credit you with $100 toward your Health Insurance Deductible.

Which is good, because our health insurance payments went up $100 a month (even though Obama promised they wouldn’t).

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There’s just one problem with Virgin’s GoZone pedometer and the HealthMiles program – there is absolutely NO WAY that they can tell who is doing the “exercise”. All a person has to do is plug the darn thing in at the end of the day, and the computer will come up with some number (which appears to have absolutely nothing to do with the number on the pedometer).

As far as GoZone is concerned, yesterday I took 2031 steps.

In actuality, I sat on my fat ass all day, and let Bailey the Wonder Dog do all of my exercise for me. I just attached the pedometer to her collar and surfed the Internet – after a couple of hours, she had racked up over 700 steps.

Good Doggie!

Then, I took the device off of her collar (which added about 50 more “steps”), and just to see what qualified as a step, I swung the device back and forth for a couple of minutes – which added another 533 “steps”.

All of these “fitness experts” seem not to have been paying attention in science class when Newton’s First Law of Motion was being taught:

An object that is at rest will stay at rest.

And I would like to add a little something that I’m gonna call The Koch Corollary:

If there is a way to get around the system, you can bet that a halfway clever person will find it and take advantage of it.

What I really want to know is just how much all of these companies are spending on this program to “save” them money – and how much their employees are paying out of their own pockets to make their company feel like they are “doing something”….

….when all they are really doing is making Richard Branson richer.

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