{"id":15313,"date":"2010-01-12T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-01-12T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2010\/01\/12\/weight-gain-4000-the-competition\/"},"modified":"2010-01-12T07:00:00","modified_gmt":"2010-01-12T07:00:00","slug":"weight-gain-4000-the-competition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20100112-00\/?p=15313","title":{"rendered":"Weight Gain 4000, the competition"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Some years ago, one of my colleagues mentioned at the lunch table, &#8220;I went hiking this weekend, and man, my backpack was so heavy. I weighed it, and it was like 35 pounds. And then I realized, wait a second, I&#8217;m overweight by 35 pounds. I&#8217;m carrying this heavy backpack <i>all the time<\/i>!&#8221;\n Thus began a collective weight loss competition we called <i>Weight Gain 4000<\/i>, named after <a href=\"http:\/\/www.southparkzone.com\/episodes\/102\/Weight-Gain-4000.html\"> an episode of <i>South Park<\/i><\/a> which had aired recently. (&#8220;I&#8217;m not fat; I&#8217;m big-boned!&#8221;) I set up a Web page where people could enter their current weight, and it charted everyone&#8217;s <i>pounds over target weight<\/i> as a function of time. Oh, and the goal was to lose weight, not gain it.\n It so happened that I won this little competition with the aid of some extra bike rides. Then again, I also had the least amount of weight to lose. And my colleagues accused me of cheating because I managed to accelerate my weight loss as the deadline approached. (But I didn&#8217;t cheat, honest!)<\/p>\n<p> I was reminded of this competition from years ago when I read about <a href=\"http:\/\/seattletimes.nwsource.com\/html\/living\/2004374437_fatbet28.html\"> John Dirks and Adam Orkand<\/a> who also learned that an effective way to make you stick to your weight loss plan is to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.fatbet.net\/\"> make a wager out of it<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some years ago, one of my colleagues mentioned at the lunch table, &#8220;I went hiking this weekend, and man, my backpack was so heavy. I weighed it, and it was like 35 pounds. And then I realized, wait a second, I&#8217;m overweight by 35 pounds. I&#8217;m carrying this heavy backpack all the time!&#8221; Thus began [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[103],"class_list":["post-15313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-non-computer"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Some years ago, one of my colleagues mentioned at the lunch table, &#8220;I went hiking this weekend, and man, my backpack was so heavy. I weighed it, and it was like 35 pounds. And then I realized, wait a second, I&#8217;m overweight by 35 pounds. I&#8217;m carrying this heavy backpack all the time!&#8221; Thus began [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15313\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}