So I promised to post about the contest all the nurses at work are doing -- it's our version of The Biggest Loser. A bunch of us are trying to lose weight (some just want to lose 5 pounds, others are trying to lose upwards of 50 pounds), so we decided to turn it into a twelve-week contest to give ourselves some motivation. There's now a huge whiteboard in Jen (our nurse manager)'s office, with all our names down the left side, divided into 12 columns (one for each week). We're each paying a dollar a week to participate, dieting and exercising on our own as we choose to, then weighing ourselves at the end of each week. At the end of the contest, whoever has lost the most weight will win the entire pot of money -- probably at least $120 and maybe a little more, since we also have to pay a dollar for every pound we gain.

Nobody wanted their actual weight recorded on the public chart, so we chose one nurse, whom we all like and trust, to be the Weightkeeper. Each week, she comes into the triage room with us one at a time to do our official weigh-ins (on the fancy-schmancy, fly-to-the-moon digital scale), then does the math and writes down only the difference on the whiteboard, whether it's up or down. I'm hovering around fourth place right now, having lost almost three pounds last week during week 1. I weigh again tomorrow, so we'll see what happens. I know I've gone down a little more, but I'm sure it's not as much as last week. I don't have as much weight to lose as some of the others (I actually weigh the exact same thing now that I did during my senior year of high school), so I'm not holding out too much hope of actually winning, but I at least want to put up a good fight.