No, I'm not gonna whine about how old I am or how little hair I have or gonna bore you with any of the grief others or I have recently endured. Instead, I will tell you about a new initiative happening here at the hotel. Some of you might be aware that there is a program in the US called The Biggest Loser. There is a spin-off of this in the UK and also in Germany I believe whose names currently elude me.

In essence, it's a program about losing weight. We might not have cameras or drill-sergeants but still, that is what we are going to try and do here at the hotel with any associate who cares to participate. At least in principle. The program will run for 3 months and whoever loses the most weight on a percentage basis, will receive some special prize. The hotel is running the whole program and there is organized Sports activities and a special menu in the canteen. They have also given everybody a special diet plan (Ha!) and will measure progress at set intervals.

Those of you who have recently seen me back in Germany or the UK will have noticed that I had lost a bit of weight already (about 7 kgs to be precise and thank you really for all the flattering comments) but you all know also that there is still lots of room for improvement.

So, of course, I signed up. Almost my entire department actually did. About half of all the associates participate, at least for the time being. Time will tell how many of us will still be around by the time the program ends at the beginning of January.

Also, not all of us will have lost weight. You see, the entire schedule is worked out to work against you. Let me explain: You are not only fighting your body, who by the way is more than reluctant to give up any of that religiously stored fat, you are also fighting the calendar.

You don't need to be a rocket scientist (or even very smart for that matter) to work out that between now and the beginning of January lie 2 festivities which normally are not exactly associated with dieting. On the contrary, it seems that these days the sole purpose of Thanksgiving and Christmas is to submit yourself to the yearly experiment of seeing how much food (and drink) you can stuff yourself with before repairing to the couch to watch a Detroit Lions or Dallas Cowboys game or thanking good ol' Aunt Gladys (who is just a tad hard of hearing) for the lovely sweater with the Unicorn motive. In any case, the timing of the whole thing could obviously not be more unfortunate and a bigger challenge to my discipline (which most of you are perfectly aware is shaky at the best of times).

Be that all as it may, it all started for real last Monday with everybody getting weighed and photographed and then told how much weight they need to lose to achieve their ideal weight.

In my case that is a sobering 17 kilos! Yeah right! I will not share with you how much I would weigh then, but let me tell you that it must be about 15 years since I passed that weight mark. 10th grade would be my best guess. And during those days I had far more hair, good looks and brain cells!  Much as that might sound and undoubtedly is, it's nowhere near some of the kilo figures that some of my fellow associates are supposed to lose. There are individuals who need to lose more than 40 kilos, so that is the only thing that currently makes me feel slightly better. I have no intention of losing 17 kilos, if I get rid of 8 to 10 I will consider it a massive success.

Well, instead of babbling on, I must ask you to excuse me. My neighbor (the loyal Miss M from P) and I have decided that we would start all this in earnest on Monday. So until then, I'm off to enjoy life, beer, pancakes, cheesecake, full fat coke and something amazing called Cheetos, which to describe would take another whole blog entry by itself.

More next week, and ah yes, please don't tell Aunt Gladys about the Unicorn sweater...