New Year, New Me, New Challenges

This is going to be a long post so hold on to your panties and keep up with me on this.

I weighed myself last night and I am up to 277.8. Only about 2 lbs higher then last time and not bad for being on vacation for almost 2 weeks and indulging in all the things that I shouldn't have. 

I have done a lot of planning for the New Year and I hope that all that planning with start to show some of it's fruit soon. I have decided that I am going to work on up to 10 challenges this year. I know that it seems like a lot but some of it is really just tracking the same thing in different ways. Everything gets tracked a month at a time and all of the challenges will not stay through the whole year. There is only 1 thing that I will do daily that will not be on the list is to weigh in on my Wii Fit Plus game.

So to track all of this information I made my self a book:

It's sideways and I'm lazy right now and I'm not going to fix it. This is my January book and it has listed on it the first 10 challenges that I am going to work through for this month. Inside there is a page for everyday of the month with tracking for each challenge, note pages, and a month end review page in the back. Most of the challenges happen on sparkpeople.com which is a free weight loss site that bases it's program on eating right not dieting, moving more, and tracking your goals.

Here are the challenges that I am starting on:

1. Biggest Loser Winter Challenge: @ sparkpeople: This is and isn't your normal biggest loser challenges. First no one gets voted out ever. We track our weight, cardio, strength minutes weekly. There is a team challenge ever week and they run from writing your future self a letter to giving a goodie (like a prize) to other members. Each week we are compared with the 8 other teams that are also in the challenge. This is a long term thing for me because as soon as one ends another begins and they just go on and on and on. The other thing that I don't like about this challenge is that some people are over competitive and I think lie about what they did or not do. One woman in the challenge for week 1 lost 8 lbs, she was only 170 to start with and results like that are highly unlikely. Once I was on a team with a girl who consistently claimed to lose 7 lbs each week for 12 weeks. 
2. Wii Fit Challenge @ sparkpeople : This is also a long term challenge. This group is just a bunch of people that like working out on Wii Fit or Wii Fit Plus. Each week the leader of the group comes up with a challenge and there are things you have to do each day. This week it's upper, lower, and middle and the activities are all laid out for you each day. Some weeks are more simple and are in the line of just keep moving and others are more complicated like the Christmas Challenge Week was. She though up a whole story about going to cut down your own tree and made the exercises fit in for each day of the story. It was super cute.
3. #GoTheDist on Twitter and at Go the Dist Blog for start up information: Another long term challenge. This challenge is all about setting up goals for yourself that have nothing to do with food and you cannot reward your self with food either. My goal for 2012 is to walk 1000 miles by the end of the year and to do some cardio everyday for a year. Robbie's Excel Sheets are laid out so that they are easy to use and follow up throughout the year.
4. #7DayChip on Twitter: This challenge is all about starting new habits. This is also long term buy my goal for the challenge may move around a bit. I'm starting off with drinking 64oz of water each day. You have to do this for 7 days and you can post of twitter for support. If you make it 7 days then you can con't to #30DayChip and #100DayChip. I am also tracking taking care of myself daily & working out daily. (which goes along with Gothedist see I told you they over lap) but I am not tweeting about those. 
5. Walk @ Walgreens can be found at walk.walgreens.com: They are doing a new program where if you create an account and log your walks they give you free stuff. So far I have only got a bunch of coupons which is not bad but I'm going to keep up with this one to see what else they are going to give out. Another long term tracking project. 
6. Mountain Climbing Challenge on Spark: In one of my groups they listed 30 mountains and the height of all of them. The point is to climb all of the mountians. 1 step = 1 foot and you cannot add them up once you climb the first one you start back at 0 for the next one and so on. In the end you will walk a total of 441,441 steps.  This is a short term challenge but should take a while. Check back at the end of the month to see what this will eventually be replaced by. 
7. Dude Ranch Challenge on Spark: I always love these short term challenges. You play using a game called Walk It Out for the Wii. You have to start a new profile and are given individual challenges of things to collect/buy in the game. When everyone in your group complete the first clue then you do a group challenge and move on to clue #2 it take a while but is fun and takes a lot of effort. 
8. Write, Post, & Tweet about a Blog entry every day. This is long term and I think you can figure out what it's all about.
9. Track my food on both Spark and BodyBugg
10. Track my exercise on both Spark and BodyBugg

There it is. It seems like a lot but it's actually fun and with my book it's not really that much to track. I just take notes all day and sit down at night and it takes me about 10-15 minutes to get everything in for the night.

There are going to be some changes coming up soon. I have some pages that I want to make for the blog and some other things that I want to move around. Hopefully it will all get done soon.

Things are looking like this is going to be a GREAT year.