Challenge Completion

It’s cool and rainy here in town this morning. Seems like a good time for drinking coffee and working on the computers. We’re near the end of our challenge after a particularly long week, getting ready to quantify all of the hard work we’ve done over the past couple of months, and I feel pretty good about our results. Just one more workout at the gym tomorrow morning, and then we’ll put together the before/after measurements and shots for the six weeks. Since I’ve been talking about the process on this blog, I’ll post the information here along with any less horrifying pictures I can live with being public. My four readers deserve no less!

Today isn’t about the numbers, though. Progress can be so much more, and in our case it really has been. We went into this wanting to build some good habits, knowing that it takes about six weeks for most people to do so. We’re now able to add the gym, bike rides, and healthful home-cooked dinners to the food-logging habit we formed previously. And while the new habits do have a favorable effect on our numbers, they have a bigger effect on our lives. I really do believe we live better since we started getting serious about our health back in March and especially since we took on this challenge.

For example, the planning required to fit in gym/rides/dinners has improved my time management to the point that I get a lot more done in a day and end up feeling happier because I was productive. I’ve worked certain chores into the schedule so the house stays cleaner as well. Bonus! And we’re saving quite a bit of money by buying fresh meats and vegetables instead of sodium-laced Bags o’Crap at the grocery store. (Note: I still wish we had a big farmer’s market around here. Somebody get on that!) Going out to eat once a month rather than once a week has also helped.

She's choppin' broccoli!

This challenge has been a great focus for us and I’m glad I stumbled upon the opportunity to accept it. I’m also glad Brian jumped into it with me, because his support has made it infinitely better (and more fun) than it would have been on my own. He’s the best. We’re going to keep tackling these challenges for a while to build more new good habits and kill old bad ones. New goals are bubbling through our brains even now. In my case, they’re crazy things like hand-stand pushups and burpee pullups, but coming up with them is pretty fun.

Would you like to get in on these? Let me know and I’ll help you set up. You’ll be amazed at what you can accomplish when you decide you really want to. I sure was.