Your Business Is Making You Fat

If you own a business, you no doubt spend a lot of time working and a lot less time working out -- with predictable results.

In a recent survey of small business owners by research firm Manta, 44 percent of them said 2010 has taken a toll on their health, one in three said they now exercise less, 22 percent said they’re eating worse and 22 percent said they’ve put on weight.

The problem: people running a business don’t have time for jogging. Sixty-three percent of business owners in the Manta survey said they work more than 40 hours a week and 20 percent said they spend more than 60 hours a week at the job.

The good news: you don’t have to hit the gym, just knock off the Subway Double Meatball Marinara with Cheese (which, at 1,720 calories, supplies your recommended number of calories for an entire day). Research by Gallup shows most Americans say that when they have lost weight they’ve done it by improving their diet, not exercising.

Dieters say the funniest things. Maybe because they’re lightheaded? Gallup publishes all its survey answers verbatim -- and they make for interesting reading. Here are some of the more innovative methods respondents to the above-mentioned survey credited for their weight loss:

“I used a diet, it called for a lot of fish and raw chicken.”

“Every time I wanted to eat I brushed my teeth.”

“Divorce.”

“I can eat anything I want as long as I didn’t eat certain foods.”

“Just stopped eating anything that had taste.”

 “Um...marijuana.”

“Cocaine.”

“I went to doctor and they gave me something that actually turned out to be speed and it was total speed.”

Surprising small business facts. Reading the news, you think you have a pretty good picture of the typical U.S. small business. But a recent study by credit card review site Credit Donkey turned up some info on small businesses that you might not have suspected.

For example, only 7 percent of small businesses do any online sales. Just 4 percent of small businesses are family owned. Only 50 percent of small business owners have a college degree. And despite all the talk from the Obama administration about how much it supports small business, just 2 percent of small firms say that sales to the federal government make up more than 10 percent of their sales.

But some of the study findings are not so surprising. Like, credit is hard to come by. One-quarter of small business credit card applications this year have been rejected and 60 percent of bank loan applications have been turned down. Eight out of 10 small businesses use a credit card to provide working capital.

And yet 61 percent of small business owners say they’re highly satisfied with their choice of career.

Online spending way up. As noted above, under 10 percent of small businesses sell their products and services online. But they’d better start, because consumers are migrating to ecommerce in droves. A holiday-spending survey by ComScore shows 2011 online spending was up 15 percent over last year. Meanwhile, shopping in real-world stores is estimated to rise just 3-4 percent.

One of the biggest winners, predictably, was Amazon. It attracted more sales, in part, with this neat little trick: it encouraged shoppers to go to brick-and-mortar stores, check on the price of an item and report it back to Amazon via an Amazon mobile phone app. Then shoppers could get the item from Amazon for 5 percent less.

Buying under the influence. And who was doing all this online shopping over the holidays? A lot of them were drunk people, says the New York Times. It can’t offer statistical proof of the trend, since there isn’t any, but the Times does cite anecdotal evidence.

Like Tiffany Whitten of Dayton, Ohio, who said this about the smartphone case that she purchased online: “I was drunk and I bought it, and I forgot about it, and it showed up in the mail, and I was really excited.”

And Chris Tansey, a motorcycle enthusiast in Australia who one night got pissed into the wee hours and bought a $10,000 bike tour of New Zealand.

(Geez. And we felt guilty about that extra-large pepperoni from Domino’s.)

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