Corporate Wellness

I know corporate wellness programs are, at the bottom line, all about being good for the corporation.  I'm also aware of the worries about letting your company collect a bunch of health data about you, and that they may use the information against you, and so on.   In any case, I'm not sure why I'm starting this post out this way, because what I want to say is that I *love* my corporate wellness program.

First off, we have an awesome cafeteria full of healthy food.  It's possible to get a cheeseburger, or even a chicken and bacon quesadilla, but you have to ask for them special.  All of the everyday entrees and grill specials are about 12 weight watchers points, and they have a special "300 Calorie bowl" which is a small portion of the daily entree that has 6 or 7 weight watchers points.  It's not icky stuff either, it's yummy.  Tacos with rice and beans or turkey lasagna with garlic bread are a couple of the usual entrees, and they try not to have the same thing too often so it's hard to get bored.  All the food is cheap too.  The 300 Calorie bowl is $3.83, and when you refill your own cup with any drink it's only 50 cents.  They also have a salad bar with a TON of fresh, lightly steamed, and grilled veggies, and all the dressings are light.  Oh, and they have a tossed to order salad every day too, the cobb is divine.  It's like a healthy eater's dream restaurant, and it's 50 yards from my desk.

As if that weren't already a big help they have a bunch of programs to help everyone get/stay healthy, and almost all of them are free.  The Weight Watchers program I'm on is free, comes with free e-tools, and the meetings are right in the cafeteria.

We also have a walking program that's also free, and comes with a free pebble activity monitor. The pebble is basically a motion detecting device (not GPS!) that syncs with an automatic base station at work to upload my activity to a social-type website where everyone can kind of chat and encourage everyone.  It also tells me my step goal for the day.  So far I've made my step goals every weekday.

For the people who just need baby steps to fitness (and what I did all last year) we can do the Daily Challenge. Anyone can join that one and it's fun.  They email and/or text you something really tiny, yet healthy to do every day, and you can also develop a social network on the site and read about how people did their task and encourage people, and even form pacts with people that you will both complete the next five days worth of tasks.  Doing tasks gets you points, and your points grow trees, graphics of trees, um, that's not the most exciting bit of the site.

Then there's the on site gym with plenty of cardio machines, and last but not least we have free fitness classes right on site, so soon I'm be doing Zumba Mondays at 5:05.  I'm not sure how many people do the fitness classes, but its really odd that so few people use the gym.  I'm trying to go three times a week, and I go right after work and there are usually two or three people in there, and it's still January.  It should be packed, right?

Oh yeah, if we do some of the above free stuff, we get a discount on our health insurance and an extra day off.  It's not a cheesy discount either, it's like a hundreds of dollars kind of discount.  I could be all pessimistic and say if I don't act healthy they make me pay more for my health insurance, but for once I'll be an optimist.  It's like they're paying me to get healthy!