Day 7: What happens when work prevents your workout?

Another day and another night at the office, but I am finally home!  Rarely do I continue working at home.  I like to keep work at work.  The good news is that I didn't let work prevent my workout, and I managed to eat sensible meals staying within my daily caloric range of 1200 - 1500 calories.  Both are breakthroughs for me.  Once I get back into the swing of the healthy lifestyle, I manage to take 90 minutes to two hours each day to exercise without feeling like I am letting down my office.  Where does this sense of loyalty originate?  More importantly where is this loyalty to my own self-improvement? Well, the loyalty to the40-day plan was at the forefront of my activities from 6:00-7:30 tonight.  I stopped work.  I left the office.  I took care of me.  

In addition to toning the bod, training for my races, and clearing my mind, working out was a great way to balance the sedentary style of my 9 am to 11 pm.  I don't think that dangling the overtime dollars is an inspirational concept for motivating employees.  If you pay people what they are worth and inspire them to achieve excellence, then most people would be willing to occasionally stay late to get a project finished without the extra bucks.  I think overtime might actually be demotivating.  In fact, I came across an interesting study based on the work of Dr. Tea Lallukka at the University of Helsinki, who made a correlation between work fatigue, working overtime and the risk of weight gain (Int J Obesity 2005; 29:909).  Although overtime might be temporarily good for the wallet, it might be permanently bad for the waist. 

My motto, "Wasting time at the office only increases your waist."  Prioritize your work.  Don't work more than two hours of overtime a day.  If you have to work overtime, then for every hour of overtime, make sure to put in thirty minutes at the gym. 

WTF moment, besides being asked to "remind [nameless colleague] to meet with [me] when [nameless colleague] return from [an awesome employee sponsored overseas educational trip]." I know that I have multiple roles at the office, but diarying events for others isn't one of my assigned tasks.  It's actually a secretarial/executive assistant task.  Then again, maybe I have another hat to wear.  Oh right, WTF priorities, I weighed in at 219 today.