UPDATE: A coworker told me about the “Pound for Pound” promotion that will support local food pantries. I just signed up!

While I avoid making New Years resolutions that include the words “diet,” “exercise” or “resolution,” I did decide to help organize a weight-loss challenge at work.

Maybe it was the endless commercials for the television show, “Biggest Loser.” I did stop watching them after I read about an Australian study linking television watching to an earlier than necessary death. No sense tempting fate.

Whatever the reasons, I joined 22 fellow employees who are throwing $10 into a pot that one person will earn on March 8. That person will have the greatest percentage weight loss between today and March 8.

Most of us are using the challenge as a motivational tool to eat better and exercise more. I’ll use it as an opportunity to trash talk my colleagues, now that football season is winding down and my Chicago Bears have gone into hibernation. Lately it stinks to work with Vikings and Packer fans.

First challenge: The IABC/Chicago board meeting tomorrow night at the Ben Pao restaurant. I might have to pass on the egg rolls and fortune cookies.

Any helpful ideas for losing about 25 pounds in eight weeks? Please don’t suggest that I cut off a limb or stop eating completely. I may like to trash talk my colleagues, but I hate eating my words.

What are the links between effective communication and a company’s profitability? In this YouTube video interview that I recorded for IABC/Chicago using its Flip camera, Jill Folan, a senior communications consultant with Watson Wyatt Worldwide, shares some findings and insights gleaned from the firm’s “2009 Communication ROI Study Report.” (The report itself is available at this link.)

The interview was conducted just two weeks after the study results were released, at a Dec. 15, 2009 lunch event organized by IABC/Chicago’s professional development volunteer staff.

Folan was interviewed by IABC/Chicago member Julia Winn, who also created the video.

I plan to spend part of my New Year’s Day watching a movie that I received as a Christmas present: “Mr. Holland’s Opus.”

As anyone in my immediate family will tell you, this is the movie that makes me cry every time, without fail. I’ve watched it often, and always lose it at one or more places within the movie.

Recently I took my family to watch the movie, “The Blind Side.” This is the movie starring Sandra Bullock as the woman who takes in a homeless black teenager. That teenager is now a professional football player.

The Blind Side also is the movie that seems destined to join Mr. Holland’s Opus as a movie that is guaranteed to start my waterworks flowing.

I’ve already added it to next year’s Christmas wish-list.