Day 29 - July 25th

Wow, I am a lazy boy. Really. This was supposed to be a daily commitment, but you know...I have a life...and writing every day doesn't rank too high on my must-do list of things I must do. Certainly not as high as watching cartoons with my nephew, or playing video games. Some days, though,it's higher than getting dressed. Today is one of those days. So here I sit, in front of the tv, laptop on top of my lap, clad in a t-shirt and comfy lounge pants, thinking of how best to convey the daily struggle to keep losing pounds.

So. Ghostbusters. They're making a third movie, due out in 2011, if they see it through. I dunno, though. Bill Murray and Dan Ayckroyd got pretty fat in their old age, and I just don't see them squeezing into those jump suits again. Probably you remember the first movie, when they go to the hotel and they corner the ghost in the dining room. After shooting the place up, they get the ghost in the proton beams and wrestle it back and forth until it's over the trap and then...whoosh, show's over.



While getting to 230 was the equivalent of that scene (easy, simple, quick), trying to edge to 220 is a bigger struggle. Some days I manage to get down to 226, and then the next day I'm back at 229. It feels much more like fighting the Marshmallow Man, and some days I look like the Marshmallow Man. All pudgy and grinning.



Anyhow, that's the fun part, now comes the lesson.

In the 1920s, the Hawthorne Plant in Cicero, Illinois, was making electrical relays. The management thought it would have a little experiment. In one part of the factory they increased the light, and those workers managed to make more relays. The management thought it was obvious: more light means the workers can see better and therefore work faster. Then they made that section cleaner, and productivity went up, they gave the workers more breaks and productivity went up. The management thought this was all amazing. Then they started to return the two areas to the same standard. They reduced the lighting, took away the breaks and allowed the workers to clean their own stations. But oddly, every time they changed something back productivity went up again. Eventually, both areas were back at the original conditions, but the experimental area was working much faster than the non-experimental area.

The big-wigs scratched their chins and wondered: WTF.

It took another couple of decades for someone to figure it out. They called it the Hawthorne Effect. The fact that when someone knows they're being watched, they work harder, and that every change demonstrated to the workers that they were being watched. You and I just call it "Quick! Look busy, the boss is here!"

The reason I mention it is that weight watchers and other diet and exercise things make us do that to ourselves. We change things to try to lose weight and as long as we're being honest about applying ourselves to each new thing, we're successful, even if it's just for a while.

So I'll leave you to ponder on that while I go make some lunch and figure out what I want to do with the rest of the day. Maybe getting dressed will feature.