Pick a Card, Lose Some Weight

For us, a game of cards means a long night of beer and cigarettes. Nothing healthy about that.

But instead of losing a few bucks, we could have been losing a few pounds.

Former Navy Seal Phil Black has created a pack of playing cards called FitDeck. Each card describes one of 50 different upper, middle, lower and full-body exercises. Your exercise routine is like a poker hand, with the cards that you pick forming a random workout.

Sounds like a lot of work to us, but then again, we get winded just pressing the remote.

The idea for FitDeck hit Black when he was an undergraduate at Yale University. Every night, he and his pals would play poker. One night, he grabbed the deck of cards, shuffled them thoroughly, and randomly selected 15 cards. The number on the card determined how many push-ups he would do.

Hmm, sounds like a great drinking game to us. Instead of push-ups, we’d be doing shots of tequila.

But what do we know. Last year, the company reported sales of nearly $5 million.

Still, we’re not the only ones who thought Black should have kept his day job.

The first person to call FitDeck a dumb idea was one of his business school professors. “He said, ‘I don’t think this is going to fly,’” Black admitted to the Baltimore Sun. “That took the wind out of sails big time.”

So much so, Black took a Wall Street job after graduating rather than pursue his entrepreneurial dream. But he burnt out after a year and a half, packing on 30 extra pounds in the process.

Today, the only extra weight he carries is in his wallet.