I didn’t gain the “Freshman 15″ when I went to college. In fact, I lost weight. I lost weight because I was training for softball, and because terrified of my dorm’s cafeteria food and didn’t have the money to go out to eat all the time. The one thing I could eat there without fearing for the well-being of my stomach was the awesomely fresh salad bar. I ate salads for lunch and dinner and cereal for breakfast. I also didn’t drink. I gained weight back once I slowly integrated cafeteria food into my life (oh, how I some times pine for 4:30 dinners to this day!), but not more than what I weighed when I started school.

I gained the desk-job 15 when I started working my current job two and a half years ago. I went from teaching 6 to 9 year olds, and being on my feet for at least eight hours a day (sometimes in heels, thank you very much) to sitting in a cozy chair for eight hours. The most exercise I get is a good finger work out, and the occassional nerf basketball game of P-I-G. You gain weight when you consume more calories than you burn. It’s a simple equation and I’d never had to worry about it before. Enter desk job and mid twenties and hello extra 10 pounds.

I don’t eat any worse, in fact, I eat better. It is the lack of physical activity that has caused my weight gain. And, while I play recreational sports and work out occasionally I find there just aren’t enough hours in the day for me to set an exercise schedule for myself that I can stick with consistently. Part of this is laziness (I will totally admit that) and the other part of it is life. Like two of my best friends in the world are planning their weddings that I am going to be in (yipee!). Birthdays and shopping trips, and dry cleaning and grocery shopping, and doctor’s appointments and all of that good jazz…

So, here’s what I’m suggesting: in an effort to make the general population more healthy, employers should adopt a little special somethin’ from our military – Mandatory Physical Training. Employers should offer their employees one hour of time during the standard 8 hours for a physical activity of the employees choice. This is not “lunch.” This is not an extra 9th hour of the day. For example, whatever hour of the day works best for me and is approved by my boss, between my hours of 8:30 and 5, I should be able to take to do whatever physical activity I want. Maybe I want to walk. Maybe I want to play 3 on 3 basketball. Maybe I want to do yoga. Whatever it may be, I get that hour to do so. Employers could offer different activities and people could sign up for them on a weekly basis. No ten-mile runs or marches or any of that stuff. We’ll still leave that to the military.

Let me explain all of the birds I am theorhetically killing with this one stone. First of all, physical activity has been proven by upteenzillion studies to increase the levels of serotonin in a person’s brain. This means happier, more awake employees. Productivity up. Coffee consumption down.

Second of all, it would give employees time to burn some calories that they aren’t going to burn while processing flow charts and putting together proposals. This means healthier employees, which potentially could impact health care costs for the employer. I know I’m stretching a bit here, but hey, if this idea took off, who knows. The impact could be huge.

Thirdly (is that a word?), this could create jobs. In a time when our country is both concerned about national healthcare and the desperate need for jobs, having an exercise program that employers could adopt would create jobs for exercise instructors. Someone’s gotta teach my yoga class because I sure as heck don’t know anything about yoga other than I should probably take it so I can continue to play volleyball. If we ever do go to a national healthcare system or whatever, there could be subsidies for employers who gave their employess time to exercise on the clock.

I understand this is asking a lot. I’m basically saying, “Hey! Pay me to get some exercise!” However, I think if a well thought out program like this were to pop-up (and maybe it already has somewhere… I wouldn’t doubt if Google did this for their employees), I think the benefits would outweigh the cost of paying everyone for an hour to work out. My employer offers smoking cessation classes, which I think is fantastic. However, it’s a benefit that I pay for but will never use. How about something that rewards people who are healthy and working to stay that way?

Just some thoughts here. Until I start getting my hour to become a pilates machine I’m going to stick to doing 15 squats every time I get back to my desk. And volunteering to check the mail every hour. And betting myself I can’t drink more than 8 bottles of water a day. That creates more trips to the rest room, and I’ve got about a .1 mile walk there and back. That will start to add up, right?

Annie is the Sports and Fitness Editor for Girls Guide. She writes about all kinds of sports related topics and then really goes out and plays sports almost every evening. You can contact Annie by emailing her at annie [at] girlsguidetothegalaxy [dot] com, and we are still trying to talk her into getting a Twitter account – no success yet.