Being a Unit of Measurement

02 May 2019 at 20:21 // under Work

At the start of last month, a team member announced that at the end of the shutdown, he was going to weigh the same as me. He was going to start eating healthier and focusing on his exercise. I was unaware of this at the time, I was working off-site at a suppliers factory and I am still not quite sure why I ended up being the target of this challenge.

My boss received a message, out of the blue, asking what my weight was. The rest of the team had already taken guesses at how many Alistairs my colleague weighed and placed them on the team whiteboard. After I gave my weight (without asking any questions). It turns out he weighed just over 1.5 Alistairs. The team then placed their predictions for how many Alistairs he will weigh by the end.

After a couple of weeks, I was back in the office for a day and it was then that I got the story of what had been going on. My colleague had been updating the weight measurement showing his progress. He then got excited as I pointed out that my weight had changed slightly as well, I had put on about a kg since the had last asked (my weight varies with a noise band of about a kg). This made his number look even better.

Since then we have both been getting lots of dietary advice from the rest of the team. Mostly he is being encouraged to eat pies and cakes, while I am being told to starve myself. We have a very supportive atmosphere and are happy with our the successes of other members of the team. He is still hovering around the 4.7 region though generally making progress. I took a bit much pleasure this morning when I returned to the office and amended his last update. He had lost 1.5kg, so the table showed a drop, however when I then pointed out that I had lost the kg from the previous week, I am now back at my starting weight again, it completely wiped out his 1.5kg and he had gone up according to the weight in Alistairs.

The scale is much more sensitive to my weight changes than to his. Part of me wants to have fun with this. Can I (safely¹) loose any more weight and make it really difficult for him, or do I do my duty as a good unit of measurement and work hard at keeping my weight steady for the remainder of the challenge?

1. According to my BMI, I can lose another 3kg and still be in the healthy weight range ↩

Go Top