Health and the Workplace

Scott Adams found that many readers of his book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, considered “diet and exercise inappropriate "filler" for a book on success”. Adams being Adams wrote a blog explaining why they were wrong:
“Studies show that exercise and diet have a huge influence on brain health. You need your brain for most occupational challenges...Stating the obvious, healthy people have fewer sick days than unhealthy people...Depending on your sporting preferences, exercise might be a great networking tool as well...Exercise and proper nutrition have a huge impact on your stress levels. And you know you don't operate efficiently when your body is in stress mode.”

Hard to argue with any of that. Except we don't look at things that way. Adams blames the media for that:
“I blame the media for putting diet and exercise in the "vanity" bucket while hard work and education are in the "success" bucket.”

This reminded of an episode of Boston Legal where Denny Crane fires an employee for, well, being fat. And so, of course, she sued the firm. Alan Shore defends Crane in the courtroom:
“In fact more employers should draw a harder line on obesity...65 percent of American adults are obese. It’s one of the leading causes of death in this country. The health care costs run about 117 billion dollars a year.”
And since you can find a study in support of anything:
“Given this new study at Harvard...Simply having fat friends can triple your risk of becoming obese...If obesity is contagious through social networking, then maybe all employers have a duty to their employees to weed out the heifers! And maybe it’s about time to put aside our inflated sense of political correctness and practice a little tough love with our friends and families. Say to a loved one, “You’re fat!” Tell a friend, “You look like a hippo. On the verge of a heart attack.” Shock them into going on diets, not just to save themselves, but possibly their friends and coworkers. That’s all Denny Crane was trying to say, and perhaps he should to be applauded for it.”

When both Alan Shore and Scott Adams argue in favour of something, it's hard to resist it, even if it is politically incorrect.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more