An introduction

Prelude

A local gym has been offering a 12 week “Breakfast Club”. The basic deal is for a certain sum of money (quite reasonably priced), you get a 1 hour organised training session (7am Monday, solely with workmates) followed by a healthy breakfast at a nearby cafe.

On top of that you get free access to the gym for the remainder of the week, including other scheduled sessions (open to any gym member) which happen over the week.

The company I work for is quite keen for people to be healthy, and so has offered to cover some of the fee, making it less than half what the gym charges. I don’t want to mention figures, but we’ll say that my portion would be about what a breakfast at a cafe would set you back.

However as an extra incentive, my employer has said that if a participant turns up to at least 10 of the 12 organised sessions, they will cover the total cost of the 12 week program. So if I can make it, it will be essentially 3 months gym membership and 12 breakfasts, for free.

Now, I am a lazy lazy man. (You will hear more on this as this blog progresses). But I am also aware that I need to be more fit than I am. I am also extremely stingy or, as we say at work, tight.

The unique opportunity that this offer provides is on two levels. On the first level, I am paying for something. Regardless of how cheap it is, if I pay for something I want to get value out of it, and so I will participate. I have, in fact, used this with reasonable success as an incentive to lose weight in the past. Pay money for a set of diet books not because I need books to tell me that I need to eat healthy and exercise, but because if I pay for something I want it to be worth it, and so will use it.

But the second level is that if I participate fully then I get all my money back. As soon as I wrote my name on the list, I was pitting my tightness directly against my laziness. In a cage match. With those foldy chairs.

So I did indeed sign up. It is now Friday of the first week. As I will explain more in my next post, I am going to blog my experiences at the gym, and with the program, as it goes along (So my first few posts will be over this weekend, to catch up on this week, and then they’ll be a bit steadier from next week on). I encourage you to comment, and to tell me of your experiences with the gym, exercise, weight loss. I expect this blog to last for the 12 weeks, but probably not for any longer.

There may well be swearing.