Attention, employees who want to learn how to cheat in a corporate wellness contest: for the actual cheating hints, skim down to: “How to Cheat in a Crash-Dieting Contest.” The suggestions apply not just to corporate biggest loser contests, but to any corporate weigh-in where money is attached to weight. (This post is actually intended for your company’s HR people who for some reason think encouraging you to binge and then crash-diet is a good idea and don’t realize wellness is an obvious scam.)

Further, the law has changed (as of 2019) and you can now sue your employer if they fine you (or give you a high-deductible plan and make you “earn the incentive”) for refusing to participate in biometric screens and other clinical wellness activities. You can contact us for more information.

If we were real journalists here, we’d have killed a lot of trees in the cause of exposing the massive amount of lying and cheating by wellness vendors.  However, as mere bloggers, all we do is kill millions of defenseless electrons.*

And yet we’ve sacrificed nary a single electron to the cause of exposing the massive amount of lying and cheating by the employees themselves.  And massive it is. My very own extended family members are swapping Fitbits around to increase their steps.  Less for the money than for bragging rights about who can game the contest the best.

Indeed, these corporate “challenges” are really mental challenges, not physical ones, to see who can do the best job outsmarting the wellness vendor.  Outsmarting wellness vendors, as past columns have shown, isn’t exactly a heavy lift: we have often observed that the good news about wellness is that NASA employees don’t have to worry about their job security because wellness vendors aren’t exactly rocket scientists.

To that end, the Wall Street Journal wrote an entire article about employees cheating in wellness programs. Apparently, employees are enlisting puppies, hamsters, even power tools and a ceiling fan in their quest to undermine their company’s wellness program. One enterprising employee posted a youtube showing how to cheat on these programs.  A Midwestern cadre of truly dedicated employees took cheating a bit farther than most, and got themselves indicted for defrauding Kansas City out of $300,000 by lying on wellness programs.

There are entire blog posts on how to cheat in a wellness program, and even a gadget available online to help you do exactly that.

30-second shameless plug time

Of course, there is one surefire way to avoid the downside of cheating: design cheating into the program. And that’s exactly what Quizzify does.  The way to cheat on Quizzify is to look up the answers and learn about health literacy — which is exactly what we want employees to do!

How to cheat in a crash-dieting contest

Employees especially like to cheat in crash-dieting contests, enough so that countermeasures are needed. For instance, a vendor named Healthywage is bragging about how it ferrets out “fraudulent participants.”  I figured I’d see what the internet has to offer on corporate biggest loser program cheating, because, after all, these days almost every search generates tons of hits.  I say “almost” because if you search on “honest wellness vendors” and “Wellsteps,” there is only one hit: my observation that the latter could never be confused with the former.

In particular, the search found a group called www.healthstatus.com, which has given this topic altogether too much thought, thankfully. In all fairness to the HealthStatus folks (who do seem very well-intentioned and on the level), before they list their recommendations, they provide a cigarette-type warning label, as these programs richly deserve:

It’s getting to be New Year’s resolution time and many companies will try and “encourage” weight loss with a “Biggest Loser” type contest.  Frankly, this is really a bad idea, as it can create all kinds of bad habits and damaging activities by the participants, as they starve, dehydrate and supplement themselves in an effort to win.

Having gotten the grownup stuff out of the way, here are their “recommendations” for employees whose employers, like Schlumberger, somehow got the impression these contests are a good idea, perhaps because their mothers didn’t listen to enough Mozart when they were in the womb. A few recommendations are fairly harmless, like drink a lot of water starting 3 days early and don’t pee (or do number twosies) before your weigh-in. And, of course, wear heavy clothes, carry lots of change in your pockets etc.  You know, your typical garden-variety dishonesty that is probably woven into the culture of any employer that sponsors these contests.  (These employers think they are “creating a culture of wellness” when in reality they are creating a culture of deceit.)

By contrast, some of these other recommendations boggle our minds, and, having written exposes on the wellness industry for two years now, our minds are not easily boggled:

The day before the weigh-in, ideally about 17 hours or less before your weigh-in time, you want to get yourself a good salty snack.  A bag of chips, you know the ones that if you eat too many your lips hurt from all the salt and a nice tray of cheese and crackers.

For your dinner meal you want to load up on the  proteins and a big glass of whole milk, also, this is a day you want to skip the fiber.  This is one day of eating like this, we don’t encourage it, but a binge day also sets up your metabolism to know that is not starving, and can help in when we start burning fat after the weigh-in.

The day of the weigh-in, minimize your activity, another big glass of  whole milk with your breakfast that contains some salty options will help you retain more water.

“At this point,” they observe, “you should be a big bloated sloshing mess that needs to go to the bathroom really bad. This is the perfect time to get weighed and measured.” They also remind you to accentuate poor posture, since the long-since discredited Body Mass Index measure still preferred by most of these vendors is a height/weight ratio. (HealthStatus also offers hints for contests that use waist circumference.)

In other words, do all the wrong things — eat badly, slouch, and don’t exercise.  Be as unhealthy as possible.  So you’re already obsessing with your weight and abusing your body horrendously in the name of wellness…and the contest hasn’t even started yet!

I hate to leave everyone hanging but HealthStatus hasn’t published the rest of its recommendations yet, meaning advice on how to cheat during the contests themselves.

And a good thing because I don’t know how much more wellness a fellow can take.

Since self-abuse is actually a very serious topic, I would like to step out of character here and offer a few serious notes.  First, no wonder Optum and HERO and other Wellness Ignorati are stonewalling the Employee Health Program Code of Conduct. Nothing violates it more than their cherished corporate crash-dieting contests.  And a particular call-out of the biggest-loser worst offenders: Virgin Pulse (nee ShapeUp), Wellness Corporate Solutions and HealthyWages.  You ought to be ashamed of yourselves, even relative to other wellness vendors like Wellsteps, which had just recently established a new plateau for harming employees, that you people are blasting right through.

*Just for the record, we know that writing blogs does not kill or even injure electrons. And while Keas might find that being used in blog posts stresses them out, we would disagree.  Quite the opposite: if they enroll in wellness programs, they can live to be 100.