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Do you ever read ‘The Daily Mash’?
It pops up on my Facebook occasionally.
Always good for raising a little smile.
If you haven’t seen it before, it’s “a satirical website which publishes spoof articles”.
Written as though it’s a real newspaper but, essentially, a joke.
I saw one that tickled me the other day.
“Maverick office worker who doesn’t play by the rules immediately fired”.
Here it is, to save linking you and you going off down a wormhole and not coming back to finish this 😉
AN office worker who gets results by never going by the book and using his own unorthodox methods has been dismissed on his first day.
New employee Tom Logan, 33, began his first day at Barton Insurance Services by leaving his car parked in a haphazard way outside the main entrance, causing a major obstruction.
Logan – who spent a long period of unemployment watching The Professionals on ITV 4 – then began flirting with a female receptionist in a way that breached HR guidelines on sexual harassment.
Line manager Norman Steele said: “From the moment he put his feet up on my desk revealing a pair of cowboy boots it was clear that he would be unlikely to make it till lunchtime.
“He spoke about having a ‘hunch’ and swore that if we gave him 48 hours he’d deliver. I’d only asked if he was familiar with spreadsheets.
“Also here at Barton Insurance Services we don’t operate on hunches but on reliable data produced by our in-house team of qualified business analysts.
“At this point, he swept a tray of invoices off my desk and stormed out of the office, saying ‘Stuff your rules!’. Naturally I was immediately onto security.
“He was escorted out of the building and pointed in the direction of the impound location where his Ford Capri had been towed.”
Tickled me that did.
But there was one particular line that jumped out at me.
The preantepenultimate one.
— Third to last innit 😉 —
“Also here at Barton Insurance Services we don’t operate on hunches but on reliable data produced by our in-house team of qualified business analysts.”
Reliable data beats hunches.
Which it does.
In all areas of life.
None more so than our food and weight loss.
It’s a fairly regular occurrence that people say to us that they don’t know why they’re not losing (more) weight.
Because “I don’t eat much”.
Thousands of times probably.
We’ll usually suggest they might benefit from tracking their eating with something like MyFitnessPal for a few days.
Not forever.
Just enough to gain some some reliable data we can work off.
A verbal description of an average day’s food doesn’t really give us much to go on.
It’s a hunch, at best.
Most won’t then go and do this.
As I had before I first tried it, they’ve exaggerated in their head how much effort it is.
And decided it’s too much of a “faff” and inconvenience.
And will happily carry on exercising for hours a week and not spend minutes on this which will give them that much higher return on investment of time and effort.
When people do go and gain that reliable data, the answer nearly always jumps out at them.
They are usually quite taken aback.
They were eating more than they thought.
Maybe in volume.
Maybe in unexpected calorie density.
Usually a bit of both.
Ultimately, until it can be proven under controlled circumstances that people gain weight without being in a calorie deficit………..
Then we have to accept that they have been in an average calorie deficit over time.
And that ‘reliable data’ can help us determine where.
To figure out what adjustments we can make.
The tactical swaps we can make.
Stuff we find just as enjoyable, convenient and doable.
Or close enough.
But that reliable data always beats a ‘hunch’.
Hands down.
Every time.
Much love,
Jon ‘Iceman’ Hall
P.S. While that middle name is clearly a Maverick – Iceman – Top Gun reference, it was actually my nickname in the first year of Uni. It started serious on Day 2 of Uni. Soon became ironic 😉
