Buy Walking VideosThe Office: Weight Loss Episode
A couple of weeks ago, The Office season premier was called Weight Loss. You can see it here:
Dunder Mifflin paper is having an office competition in which the branches compete for an extra week of vacation time. The winner is the branch that loses the most weight. Of course, things at the Scranton branch get out of control, culminating with Phyllis being abandoned without her purse in a bad part of town by Dwight because she needs the exercise. Even Michael goes over the line telling tiny Angela to lose weight and her replying, “My doctor wants me to GAIN weight.”
I actually loved this episode because it shows just how fat people are treated in the workforce. If you think that it was an exaggeration when Dwight accused the heaviest people in the office of not pulling their weight, it wasn’t. Considering that Stanley had lost FOUR pounds that week, it was quite ironic, but entirely typical.
I’ve worked at offices that have sponsored weight loss competitions before and they have ALWAYS ended badly. The only time I’ve ever seen the idea of weight loss in the workplace actually WORK was when my sister’s office sponsored Weight Watchers to come to their office for an At Work program. Those who wanted to participate were given an extra hour to do so and the weight of everyone was kept anonymous.
Next time it feels like everyone in your office is against your weight loss because they happened to bring in donuts, remember this episode of The Office and know how much worse it could be if they were rooting for you.
The final irony are the commercials that NBC has thrown into this episode. They are for Hungry Man Frozen Dinners. I wrote about how entire un-dietable these dinners are here:
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February 21st, 2009 at 3:08 pm
Well, remember NBC can probably careless about our health or personal feelings. They’re a business and in this case, they have to make money off advertising since people watch The Office (great show btw). They don’t care if they are being paid by Junk Food dealers or say… the Anglican Church of America (as an example) as long as people have the money to pay NBC for its advertising rates.