In the wellness industry’s epidemic of very stable geniusitis, Healthywage is Patient Einstein.

Somehow they recruited Russian trolls to convince Schlumberger that the best thing they could do to reverse their four-year stock price decline…

…would be to: encourage their employees to binge and then crash-diet.  So far Schlumberger is halfway through its 8-week crash-dieting contest. In case you’re keeping score at home following our initial posting, here are the standings:

Pound Town has lost 10% of its weight in 4 weeks. Figure — as a conservative estimate — the average participant weighed 200 pounds at weigh-in.  A 9.86% loss of body weight equates to more than 19 pounds, almost 5 pounds a week.  The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recommends 1-2 pounds/week.

The better CDC recommendations include not crash-dieting at all, but rather improving your health and fitness, at your current weight, because rapid weight loss likely leads to rapid weight regain, and possibly even slows metabolism so that one could regain more than one loses.

However, the CDC recommendations didn’t take into account that weight regain is a big part of what makes this contest work. Employees can win the $10,000 in 2018 — and then regain the weight in order to enter again in 2019. Is this a great country or what?

Health has nothing to do with it, of course.  It’s about making Schlumberger shareholders proud again.