Oh, when bad things happen to good bloggers…

Shame on us!   Here’s what Wellness Corporate Solutions had to say about our observations of the wellness industry:

And, in all fairness, when we went to the Wellness Corporate Solutions website, we felt quite chastened.  Their website was a breath of fresh air, taking the rest of the industry to task for expecting “instant cost savings,” noting that a “focus on ROI is short-sighted.”

Further, they are totally opposed to wacky crash diets, of the type that 8-week weight loss “challenges” inspire, that cause abnormally large weight swings   As most people know by now, those may be harmful and are of course ineffective at long-term weight control.  The weight is likely to be regained and then some.  Plus contestants often binge before the initial weigh-ins to maximize contest weight loss.  That’s why Wellness Corporate Solutions quite appropriately says “stop dieting,” and “avoid making unreasonable weight loss goals.”  And “banish weight-obsessive thoughts.”

We were also thrilled to see that they “respect and appreciate size diversity” because “size prejudice hurts us all.”

Finally, a company that has done enough research to realize that you can’t save money instantly by getting employees to crash-diet for 8 weeks! How exciting is that – we discovered a wellness vendor with access to Google!

Unfortunately, perhaps along the way someone at Corporate Wellness Solutions must have failed to “respect and appreciate the size diversity” of a certain Kim Jung Un, because the North Koreans appear to have hacked into their website and announced:  a program that saves money instantly by getting employees to crash-diet for 8 weeks.

How many of your employees know the difference between a deductible and a copayment?

Naturally, this being a wellness vendor, the savings are made up.  If 20% of your employees achieve a “healthy” BMI (a statement which by itself is open to a great deal of debate, since recent research overwhelmingly says it’s better to be fit and fat than to lose weight and not keep it off), for a company to reduce its total cost by 20% means that the costs for each employee who lost the weight would have to fall 100%.

And naturally, being a wellness vendor, they don’t stop there.  It’s part of wellness vendor DNA to ignore US Preventive Services Task Force recommendations, while saying they abide by them.   In this case, they are doing both thyroid screens (not recommended) and PSA tests (emphatically not recommended).

And, naturally, being a wellness vendor, there is no concept of learning.  They did exactly the same thing that ShapeUp, Ron “the Pretzel” Goetzel, Wellsteps and others have done, which is failing to realize that we bite back.  Actually, we don’t bite back as much as we allow these geniuses to bite themselves back.  The wellness ignorati invariably self-immolate in the attempt to criticize us.  Hence our mantra:  “In wellness you don’t need to challenge the data to invalidate it.  You merely need to read the data.  It will invalidate itself.”

However, there is some good news about Wellness Corporate Solutions: NASA employees don’t need to worry about their job security, because these people are not rocket scientists.