With the kick-off of the New Year and a new semester at JD, faculty members and teachers have begun their own "Biggest Loser" competition to shed the winter pounds. It started with the first weigh-in on January 12th and will run for ten weeks.

Ruth Fitzpatrick, a staff member at the Skaggs Catholic Center, is in charge of the competition. "We have around 35 faculty and staff members participating from all three schools and the daycare," she said.

The first and last official weigh-ins of the competition will be done at school for all of the contestants. All of the others will be done at the contestants’ houses and then they will report back to Fitzpatrick with the weigh-in results. The home weigh-ins are done to give the contestants some privacy and to minimize possible unease.

Weekly prizes are a possibility that Fitzpatrick might add to the competition for an extra push of encouragement.  Dave Faires, a Juan Diego band teacher, had the idea for the  first competition last year. "It is fun to motivate each other through prizes and competitions against friends on the faculty," he said.

Last year was the first of these "Biggest Loser" competitions for JD. The battle was conducted twice and took place between the elementary school and the high school and middle school combined. "That did get very competitive," Fitzpatrick recalls. "It was kind of funny. One team would send donuts or cake, etcetera over to the other team."

Faires made immense strides towards living a healthy lifestyle during last year’s competition. He lost an amazing 150 pounds over the course of about six months and stated that through these competitions he wanted to help others who wanted to lose weight or at least focus on better health.

Weight loss and a healthy lifestyle seems to be a reoccurring New Year’s resolution, and one JD staff members are taking very seriously this year.

"The whole point of this is for each person to reach their personal goal, whether it’s to lose weight, exercise more, or just be healthier," Fitzpatrick said. "Yes, everyone wants to be the winner, but we want to encourage, inspire, and congratulate each other as well."

Whoever has the highest percentage of weight loss after the ten weeks will be crowned the victor and receive the final prize.  More than one thousand dollars in prize money up is for grabs. All participants are waiting to see who will prevail in the battle against the scale this year.