CW's Biggest "Winner"

As you might imagine, working around Catering Works delicious recipes and food production can be a real challenge to your waistline.  Whether we are simply smelling the chocolate chip cookies baking, or hearing the sizzle of the saute pans tossing buttered vegetables, seeing the stock pots stirring cheese grits or babysitting the smoker whilst it slowly cooks our house pork butt with cocoa coffee rub for 24 hours, the calories seem to cling, almost as if by magnetism alone.  We prepared over 60,000 pieces of holiday dessert in December, can you imagine passing up just one piece...a creme de menthe brownie...a decadent piece of s'mores fudge...a slice of yule log cake?  No, it's pretty impossible.  One of our employee benefits is complimentary lunch prepared with love by our talented kitchen team.  Combine holiday binging, valentine's confections, March Madness parties and our regular employee lunch (typically consisting of an entree or two, starch, salad, side dish and dessert), well - you get the picture.  We decided it was time to enact a company wide health initiative.  Taking our queue from the TV show, The Biggest Loser, we decided to make a healthy competition out of this.  The CW's "Biggest Winner" (because we think loser isn't a good word) contest started on March 21st.  We are offering cash incentives for the winner(s), those that tone, tighten, lose the most weight and have the most impact on their overall health.  We've changed the employee meal plan, eliminating starches and dessert and going heavy on the salads and vegetables.  Entree features have included Salmon, Cod, Chicken as opposed to Beef and Pork.  We've been encouraging team work outs, and having a weekly weigh in every Friday.  We're tracking the weight loss results as an overall percentage loss, and we are even awarding points to the thin and already athletic folks that are organizing group exercise routines and offering support to others.  Each week we are providing a healthy recipe and cooking tips to the participants to take home.  The power of group motivation has been really surprising, the first week alone, almost everyone participating lost a few pounds.  The final weigh in will be on June 6th, and we can't wait to reward the winners!  We'll follow up with another blog at that time, to share some more details on what we learned, what worked, what didn't and of course the biggest winners will be revealed!