Challenge Spotlight: What do you mean by "meal plan" anyway?

The most challenging (and least precise) of all my "mini" challenges is the one called "Stick to my meal Plan"

What is my meal plan? Well, there is a basic core plan and there is some grace allowance for the real world too.

• To take care of my body and have more energy I need to eat better foods. 
• To lose weight (safely and long-term) I need to eat a limited amount of food daily (your basic Calories Burned > Calories Consumed formula)
• To not go crazy out of my mind with boredom and risk falling off the wagon, I need some wiggle room once in a while.

The Core Plan - Limited portions of good foods.

I've tried the controversial Adkins plan, which, good or bad taught me a lot about nutrition from both sides of the debate. It also taught me how I am not built for extreme, self-enforced restrictions, which set me up for binge relief reactions.

I've done counting calories. This approach was both successful in helping me to lose about 20 lbs three years ago (I have since gained it back), and it also taught me a lot about the general caloric value of a lot of different foods. However, like so many, I got weary of the constant need to measure and count.

Marrying everything I've learned into one, the basic "diet" plan I'm roughly using as a guide is the Change One diet & fitness plan, a book I really enjoyed reading for its one-step-at-a-time, surviving real life approach to changing how you eat. I highly recommend it. It's the most non-crazy diet plan I've ever encountered, and was championed by my employer in our company-wide health initiative last year.

Link to the Change One book on Amazon

Based on my takeaway from the book I have structured my "core" meal plan as follows:

• Breakfast: 1 small serving fruit, 1 serving lean protein, 1 serving whole grain, 1 glass V8

• Lunch: 1 Lean Cuisine 

• Supper: 1 serving lean protein, 1 serving whole grain, 1 glass V8

• Evening snack: 2 Kashi whole grain cookies

• Cardio days: 1 banana before working out 

• Optional: Afternoon snack of fruit, unlimited vegetables (with little or no dressing), as much tea as I want, but only two cups daily can be sweetened with honey (1 tsp).

This is the plan for a "basic" day. A weekday, without things like birthday parties or holidays or other things that are part of life cropping up and providing obstacles and temptations.


Grace for the Real World

This is where my "meal plan" rule gets very subjective and where I'm going to have to tread carefully to not slack off. There are birthday parties. There are holidays. Easter Sunday is Day 84 of this challenge. There are family dinners and going out to eat and things where I might not be able to follow my "plan" ahead of time, but if I come up with an alternative that is either a reasonable swap or allow a controlled amount of indulgence for a truly special occasion, commit to it and don't stray beyond it, then I'm still not breaking my "plan" for the day.

Example. Friday of Week #1 my Mom and I went to the movies. We decided to go to Panera beforehand for supper. I love the Fuji Apple Chicken Salad there, and it's full of good things-- greens, nuts, chicken, apples, but they use a lot of dressing and it's pretty high in sugar. Giving it some thought ahead of time, I decided that the salad with a whole wheat baguette as my side would satisfy my supper plan closely enough, and to make up for the sugar in the dressing I would forgo my evening cookies that night.

That's what I decided. That's what happened. And I got a check mark in "stick to my meal plan" for the day.

I'll take each "special" day as it comes, one at time. I've had some victories so far-- I'm 100% clean avoiding office temptations, and that's a huge boon.


Another reason that the established "meal plan" isn't nailed down is that I might need to adjust it in a general way. Suppose I find myself losing weight too quickly after a few weeks? I don't really think this is going to happen, but it's just an example.

In any case, this is my true test of resolve: "No you can't have more" for 14 whole weeks...

Saturday I'm having some theater friends over for games and movies. I'm having tacos but they're sure to bring all sorts of desserts and chips and goodies. I still haven't come up with a plan...

Nothing like dieting to make me want to be even more anti-social than I already am!

Kitty Yoga

My cats can sometimes make exercise time interesting. For example, Lucy, my little lap-cat-snuggle-bug has decided on THREE occasions that the perfect time to curl up on my lap is just when I'm preparing to do the Bridge pose:

... and then she STAYS on my lap for the entire duration of the stretch. By the third time I'd managed to get my giggling under control enough to actually focus on stretching, but of course nobody is ever handy with a camera.

Toby, my handsome feline prince, likes to rub on my legs if it's close to feeding time. He has a sixth sense about when he can butter me up when I'm helpless to retaliate (in the form of cuddles)-- exercise being one of them. 

The trickiest Toby rub attack to deal with is when I'm planking (see below), because he goes under me and it tickles and then he walks around my face and his tail tickles my face. As if an ab workout wasn't hard enough already.

Week #2 Roundup

Two weeks down and 1/8 of the way finished!


Weekly success rates:

Adhering to my bedtime: 80%
Taking my vitamins: 100%
Daily Yoga/Strength: 100%
30 minutes cardio 4x week: 100%
Drinking 3 water bottles daily: 86%
Sticking to my meal plan: 100%
No pop/ no coffee: 100%

Overall success rate: 95%

Challenge: ACHIEVED!

Weight Loss: 3.3 lbs!!!


This is a perfect number, really! It's nice and substantial but not huge enough that it's going to my head and pushing me into the danger zone of reckless. My average weight loss for the first two weeks is 2.5 lbs and that's super healthy.

Let's see about trying to hold that pace.

Thoughts/observations:

The "new" excitement of putting my plans into motion has definitely worn off, and this weekend it was extra tough to get by without indulgent snacks. Part of that is my fault, because I devoted most of Saturday to reading and watching Netflix (with slight detours for writing, exercise, and light chores), and try as I might the urge to have comfort food while watching TV has not lessened. I'm going to have to come up with some more proactive strategies to deal with this problem, since I've still got a long way to go and there's still a lot of winter to hole up against too.


I do have some ideas...


As to how I feel... level, level, level. This is such a win. Bedtime has been the easiest, most enjoyable change to adopt for this challenge. I'm waking up more easily and I'm not feeling sluggish during the day. I'm learning to separate physical weariness from mental weariness. A good workout is enough to shake me free of the latter, most of the time.

Weekly word count: 4,518. Not as much as last week, but still making me happy, and I'm close to finishing a first draft of this manuscript. The reason I include it here is because part of my long-term goals for this challenge is to be healthier not just for my own vanity (that's a huge part of it, yes) but so I can live my life better, and writing is my thing. I'm not the best at disciplining myself to do it, so prioritizing my time and finding the best way to make it happen has been a fun sidebar to fold into this challenge. It's a way to think of my success in a different way than just pounds on a scale. Pounds run the risk of coming back, but these words are my achievement forever and I achieved them now.

(Provided I'm making my appropriate backups, as should every writer, every day. Heh).

And now, a motivational song for Monday!

Successes and Failures, Week #1

Week One is the toughest, so they say, but for me I always find it goes well, I guess because of the excitement of something new. Perhaps Week #2 is my true "first" week.

Notwithstanding I had some moments of triumph, caution, and failure last week.

Wednesday: Family Dinner

My Mom found a recipe on Pinterest that she wanted to try. Just about every other thing she says these days is preceded with the phrase "I saw this thing on Pinterest..." It was for baked chicken smothered in cooked spinach, cheese, and artichoke hearts. Yummy!!

"Will that fit into your diet?" she very courteously and considerately asked me (before we fully committed to this dish being the star player in the family sit-down-together dinner she wanted to have since my brother was coming by to visit after work that day).

Hmmmn... good question. Baked chicken? check. Artichokes? check. Spinach? Double check. Cheese and other stuff to make rich sauce? Ehhhhhh.... wobbly.

I haven't yet talked specifically about the "meal plan" part of my list of goals, which is for me the most important, the greyest, and most slippery slope. For now, suffice it to say I'm not calorie counting (too work-intensive and not something I care to do for the rest of my life), but I'm focusing more on portion control and maintaining a certain mix of food groups. The cheese was an indulgence but one I decided was acceptable if I kept those portions in check.

This magic meal was hot and ready and waiting the minute I walked into the door Wednesday evening and we sat down to eat right away. I got a small dinner plate out and put two of the small pieces of chicken (with the sauce) and a small extra blog of the spinach-cheese-artichoke mixture, doing my best to try and make it mostly spinach.

"That's it, this is all I get," I said to myself, looking challengingly down at my plate.

We sat down to eat. I took a bite and immediately felt the "diet depression" descend because it was super delicious and I wanted to inhale my entire plate and go for seconds. And I could've done it too.

"Nope, this is all you get," I re-emphasized to myself. I still needed to drink my third water bottle for the day so I had that with me and I focused on finishing off as much of it as I could with the meal since I'm disinclined to drink a lot of anything between meals. I took smaller bites of my food and tried to savor and rather than inhale it, just like all the nutrition pundits, books, and blogs have suggested, and you know, it actually worked. Between the food and the water, I wasn't feeling physically hungry by the time I got through my portions and by the time I downed my evening glass of vegetable juice I was actually feeling stuffed.

But I didn't collapse into a food coma. That's probably important to note.

The evening moved along. A few hours later I had my evening snack and shortly thereafter went to bed.

I had triumphed over my enemy, the desire for seconds. What would have been my seconds became a repeat of the same delicious meal the next evening.


Saturday: The Theater Party

My theater company had our annual "character awards" ceremony on Saturday night, with the promise of pizza, cake pops, and soda provided. Obviously this was a dangerous situation. After some thought I came up with the plan of foregoing my evening whole grain cookies in favor of one or two cake pops (depending on their size) and eating my dinner just before I left in the hopes of staying away from the pizza.

However, something atypical happened on Saturday. I had gone roller skating that morning with my little sister (mentoring program, not my actual little sister, for those of you who know her), and I skated hard. I wanted to make sure the skating counted as my cardio for Saturday. It's a really fun workout, though I do wish they'd turn everybody around and let them go in the opposite direction a little more often.

Anyway, I think as a result of this heavy workout, my metabolism revved up into high gear. I was extra, extra hungry all day long and I know it wasn't just in my head. I ate my supper just as planned before leaving for the theater party, but I still felt ridiculously hungry. When I got there, and saw the pizza and all the desserts (no cake pops-- but a bunch of other choices), it only got worse.

After half an hour's deliberation, I finally made a choice. I chose one piece of pizza (medium to small-ish, but with lots of olives), and one cookie (some sort of super delicious cranberry oatmeal mix). Then I sat at my table with my friends and doodled like a mad woman until the awards were over so that I wouldn't be tempted to go back for seconds. It actually wasn't that difficult. Once the pizza had settled down I finally, finally didn't feel hungry anymore. I didn't even think twice about the pop, so that was a win all around.

Even though eating pizza technically lost me my "stick to meal plan" points for the day, I still felt like it was a victory since I'd kept it under control-- until I got home. Then my brain did this:


Evil Brain: You've already lost your points for today... you might as well have extra evening snacks.

Me: But I'm not hungry anymore, and it's almost time for bed anyway.

Evil Brain: Oh, come on, you know you always want an extra bagel in the evenings. Have your usual cookies anyway. They're all healthy!

Me: Oh, all right. Since tonight is a lost cause anyway...


And then I ate about 600 calories I didn't need. Anti-success story.


Still, the situation has given me much to reflect upon with regards to recognizing true hunger and how to cope with it.


Next check-in, the Week #2 results!!

Challenge Spotlight: Water, Water everywhere...

Water is really important. It is also really boring to drink. To me.

"Oh, but I just love drinking water!" said all my high school friends ever. It felt like. Actually I'm only thinking of one specific person whom I really love and who really meant it when she said it, but I still hear it often enough that I feel ashamed, like I'm doing something wrong in feeling open animosity towards that one substance your body needs more of than anything else to, you know, survive.

Drinking water as your go-to beverage of choice is just a snooze-fest to me. I'm a sweet tooth. Almost anything else is more interesting.

But I know drinking the right amount of it will help keep me all properly flushed and stuff.... blah, blah, blah... and also help me lose weight so I've Just. Gotta. Do It.

Three 20-oz water bottles a day is the goal. (In addition to the vegetable juice I will probably consume for breakfast and dinner and also NOT counting any water I chug down as a replenishment after working out).

After a week and a half, I'm finding this one of the most annoying aspects of my challenge, and I'm seriously tempted to cut it back to two water bottles a day because I'm drinking a lot more unsweetened herbal tea than I was expecting and I never feel thirsty for a third bottle and it's making me have an even closer relationship with ye olde water closet than I already had (which was quite close enough for my tastes already, thank you very much).

I'll think about it. But I'll try to give "the three" at least three full weeks.

In the meantime, here's a dumb quirk to expound upon. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you....

(drumroll)

The SMART WATER bottle!!

Let the product endorsement begin. Isn't it smooth? Isn't it lovely? Doesn't it make you feel chic to drink from it? And isn't it nice how it doesn't crinkle loudly enough for the whole office floor to hear every time you pick it up? (Less obvious from just the sample photo).

The funny thing here is I'm not plugging the water (which... tastes like very lovely bottled water designed to make us feel better about our drinking choices, don't get me wrong) but I'm plugging the bottle. I really, really like the shape of the bottle. It is, for whatever reason, pleasing to me and I am more likely to drink dutifully if it comes in this bottle and say, an Evian bottle or a Dasani bottle.

I CANNOT EXPLAIN IT ANY BETTER. I AM JUST WEIRD THAT WAY.

So I buy two or three, drink and refill their contents until the bottles get so scuffed and gross I can't stand it any more, and then buy some more.

Also, my cats really love playing with the lids when I'm done with the bottles. 

Week #1 Roundup

Well, Week #1 is officially under my belt! Hopefully my belt is a little bit smaller as a result.

Weekly success rates:

Adhering to my bedtime: 80%
Taking my vitamins: 100%
Daily Yoga/Strength: 100%
30 minutes cardio 4x week: 100%
Drinking 3 water bottles daily: 90%
Sticking to my meal plan: 86%
No pop/ no coffee: 100%

Overall success rate: 94%

Challenge: ACHIEVED!

I stepped on the scale this morning and I admit I was a little bit disappointed to discover my weight loss for the week was only 1.8 lbs.

*frowny face*

I had been hoping for something a little more dramatic since the first week is supposedly all detox and fluid balancing and such.

However, I'm trying to have the right attitude and keep my chin up.

Here are all the reasons a mere 1.8 lb loss is encouraging.

• It's still a loss, and since I measured at the same time of day, it's probably not due to during-the-day fluctuations.
• I was wearing shorts last week and this week I was wearing workout leggings. That's worth a few ounces, right?
• It will keep me from getting cocky and reckless in my food efforts this week.
• Losing slowly is better for you anyway.
• Even at this rate, I'll still lose 25 lbs by the end of the challenge.
• It's almost a certain time of the month, which makes its share of contribution.

Now, more importantly than what the scale says, I should talk briefly about how I feel.

I feel really good.

At the moment, I don't feel like scaling Everest (see last bullet point above), but since about Day #3 onward I have felt level, balanced, and the cloud of malaise that ordinarily hovers over my head is basically gone.

I got almost 6,500 words written toward my novel this week. That alone makes it a quantifiable success.

Onward and upward! (downward?...)

Challenge spotlight: Yoga/Strength

My high school gym teacher used to shout something as part of our daily stretch routine:

"Toes together, knees together! Lock those knees!"

I am severely bow-legged. I physically cannot do this, something which always amused me greatly in gym class. So I was forced to settle for toes together, knees locked-but-about-three-inches-apart.

These days I settle for toes together, knees together but NOT locked. If I do this, I can actually touch my toes on the Sun Salutation.

This is how my established Yoga set goes:

• Half-Moon Pose
• Warrior Pose
• Sun Salutation
• Triangle Pose
• Bridge Pose
• Downward-Facing Dog

... all as dictated by my beloved Wii Fit Plus program.

In addition, for the moment I'm doing the 30-40 second plank and 5 pushups from the knees.

I like doing these stretches. I have a really long back subject to lots of kinks and knots. With any luck (and a lot of dedication) I will be doing this every single day of the 100 Day Challenge.

(Someday I'd like to do 10 good strong "real" pushups (not from the knees) in a row. I have hopes and dreams, you know. But I also have abysmal upper body strength so I think this is a pretty awesome yet realistic goal, all things considered)

I love doing the Yoga on Wii Fit, once I figured out which ones I really enjoy and can perform. (I can't do the Tree, nor anything else that involves balancing on one leg, really). It's relaxing and feels good. Especially the Triangle Pose, which stretches like four obscure things at once.

Also, when I do the Triangle Pose, I usually get this song stuck in my head and sing it with "Triangle Pose" substituted for "Triangle Man"

Challenge Spotlight: I'm sorry, did you say "No Coffee"?

CHALLENGE: No pop, no coffee.

For most of my life-- heck, even for most of my adult life-- I haven't been a coffee person.

(Read that again in case you skimmed-- HAVEN'T been a coffee person).

What changed, you may ask?

Why, I started hanging out with my highly enabling writing group on a semi-regular basis and I was introduced to flavored creamers and things sort of snowballed from there. Now I really like coffee if it's highly creamed and highly sugared, but this fashion of drinking it translates to lots of empty calories. Hence... the challenge of trying to cut it out while I lose weight.

One of the nice things about this bit of challenge is that it's easily "replaced" by drinking tea (black, green, or herbal), which almost uniformly satisfies my craving for something hot and comforting in the morning, evening, or wintry midday. Exploring different teas will be an entertainment of sorts as I go along.

The other nice thing is that coffee will most likely be acceptable to pick up drinking again when I hopefully lose the weight I'd like to lose and am ready to bump back up to a "maintain" level of calorie intake.

Soft drinks are a more life-long nemesis. I say "pop" and will continue to do so for the duration of this blog. Feel feel free to start lively conversations about the various regional nomenclature for soft drinks-- I have friends to whom the word "pop" is ridiculously funny for some reason.

I drink mostly diet pop, not due to any pretensions that it's more beneficial to my health, but a preference for the taste. I've found that pop is, to me, a lot like cigarettes are to smokers. I did a 30 day "Stop the Pop" campaign last year which I achieved, but I was amazed to discover how many different ways I enjoy sucking down on sweetened carbonation-- during a meal, when I'm particularly thirsty, and especially with pizza. Pizza and a dark pop are like bread and butter to me. Without a Diet Pepsi or Diet Dr Pepper (my particular kryptonite), I sometimes don't even see the point of pizza.

The detriments of pop-drinking are so great that I'd love to be one of those people that can give it up entirely. I'm not sure that's possible, but learning to live without it for 100 days is surely a place to start. We'll see what things look like on the other side.

So today is day three and I haven't had either of these beverage types since lunchtime last Sunday.  For last year's "30 Days" campaign I got the most monstrously evil caffeine withdrawal headache, so I was prepared for something similar, but it was surprisingly more navigable this time around.

Ooooh, I just used the word "navigable"....

The Danger Hour

My various dieting discoveries over the past three years have illuminated my greatest weakness in long-term nutritional success:

THE DANGER HOUR

(dun-da-duuuuuuun)

I'm really, really good at eating a healthy breakfast, and eating a light but nutritious lunch. I can breeze through the first ten hours of the day like a Model-of-Moderation Robot ®.

But then I get home.

And all of that moderation transforms into "I Need to Hibernate for the Never-ending Winter*!!"

(*irrespective of the actual season)

In other words, I forage. I scour the kitchen and start scarfing down anything quick and easy and enjoyable-- chips, cheese and crackers, jelly toast, cereal, whatever's on hand. I usually don't even bother with plates or sitting at the table. I just stand at the counter scarfing and look for something to scarf next.

I think this habit is an evil marriage of all the reasons I love food-- comfort, celebration, and boredom. If I've had a bad day, I'll pillage the cupboards for comfort. I'm also celebrating having reached the end of the work day.

Then there's the fact that I'm actually, you know, hungry. I definitely need to eat. Just... with control.

The closer I get to bedtime, the easier it gets to resist this scavenging instinct, hence the labeling of the term "Danger Hour" (though it doesn't disappear entirely). But there is a red zone and I need to figure out how to navigate it smartly.

So...

Strategies

(1) Get out of the kitchen.

Out of sight, out of mind. Unless it's actually time to eat supper, just don't go in there at all.

(2) Eat at the table.

When it is supper time, fix everything properly, on a plate, with a place setting, and put away all extra food before sitting down to eat. After eating, see strategy #1 above.

[Last night I actually ate my supper downstairs watching TV and I was fine, so this one might be extraneous, but it's something to keep in my back pocket]

(3) Keep brain (and hands) occupied. 

Distractions, distractions, distractions. Hopefully, half the time this will be achieved by means of exercise. However, on off days good choices for distracting myself (and more importantly, making it inconvenient) from overeating are sewing or playing video games. Stuff that uses my hands to where mindless snacking simply is not an option.



My insatiable desire to snack while reading or watching TV is a different (though similar) hurdle, and probably best for the topic of another post.


In other news, Day 1 was a great success!! I feel tired, but a good tired, probably due to a combination of caffeine withdrawal, first time exercising in four weeks, and still trying to play games with my sleep schedule. But I stuck to my meal plan and falling asleep didn't take long.

Further up and further in!

And we're off!

Okay, official starter stats are in:

Weight: 198.4 lbs

Bust: 44.5"
Waist: 37"
Hips: 47.5"
Thigh: 27.5"
Arm: 13.5"


BEFORE PICTURES:

My sister said I had to make "blah depressed" face for it to be a proper "before" picture. Not sure if you can see it, but the zits on my cheek and the flat, frizzy hair add an extra touch of dowdy!

I gave a lot of thought to what shirt to wear for my before/after pictures.  I settled on this tank top because when I look in the mirror (and suck in my tummy) my eyes play optical illusions with me and I think it looks one way and it really doesn't. I'm curious (and hopeful) that I can get reality to match -- or come closer to-- my trick vision.

 (I especially love the shoes-- there weren't part of the plan, really)

Here we are toasting to our success! (with water-- her idea!! But we did bust out the real champagne flutes for the occasion! )

In other news, I managed to get out of bed and get going with my alarm clock at 5:30 a.m. This is probably due to first day adrenaline, but it still feels good. I already got my daily minimum writing done!

Challenge spotlight: To Sleep, Perchance to Energize?

GETTING ENOUGH SLEEP
(and following this thing called a "Routine")

I'm a night-owl. Have been since I was little, if my mother is to be believed. My brain has a tendency to want to wake up around 9:00 p.m. or so, usually in spite of how tired I may be otherwise.

But... I have a day job. One that includes a long drive and a long walk just to get to the office. So staying up late (especially in the last few years of aging) has been more and more ill-advised.

Back in November I started trying to go to bed at 11:00 on weeknights. It was honestly hard at first. I was more used to staying up to midnight or 12:30, sometimes even 1:00 am, just watching TV or reading or piddling around on the internet. However, after a couple of weeks my body (and my brain) got used to it, and I've definitely noticed a difference in my alertness level during the day.

For the 100-day challenge I'm going to try and bump this bedtime up to 10:00, which is going to be really, really hard, but could be really rewarding.

In addition to going to bed at a certain time of night, I'd really like to be able to wake up at a certain time of the morning.

This is a much bigger challenge. In high school and college I was one of those people who slept as long as humanly possible before bounding out, flying through the bare minimum of dress and hygiene time and bouncing out the door with breakfast in hand on the way to my very full day.

I am not 22 anymore. This is no longer the case. I need time to wake up, clear my brain cobwebs, snuggle my cats, etc.

On the rare occasion that I actually commit to waking up the mornings (I tend to make love to the snooze button for half an hour), they can actually be the most productive for me. Maybe it's the quiet. Maybe it's the psychology of cleaning something being a more appealing choice than going out in the cold to get to work (as opposed to the evenings when I'm tired and the choice is clean something vs. sit and watch TV).

My hope is that I can follow a 10:00pm - 5:00 am sleep schedule. This year, I have a very specific reason I want to be early-morning productive, but I'll talk about that at a later date.

I will be back on Monday. The big'un. DAY ONE!!! Measurements and weigh-in and a "before" picture, if I'm feeling especially brave.

In the meantime, ♪♫ "When you wake up, WAKE UP! It's healthy!" ♪♫

Hello, World!

So, like a lot of people around the New Year, I want to trim up this year, hopefully to the tune of about about 20-30 lbs.

More importantly (and more permanently) I want to learn to control how I eat instead of feeling like how I eat controls me. I'm a junk food nut. A chronic sweet tooth. I eat as a response to stress, to boredom, and to celebrate. At times I eat just because it's what I've learned to do.

Over the past three years I've done a lot of reading on weight loss, exercise, and nutrition. I've had successful runs at some attempts to eat smarter, but I always compensate for my sacrifice by over-indulging in some other area.

Examples:

• I've stuck to a good meal plan for a spurt and done pretty good with exercise for a spurt, but I've never successfully spurted them together. And I don't want to spurt, anyway, I want to sustain. That's kind of the point.

• I cut out lots of sweets but would drink lots of diet soda to satiate my sweet tooth, which really doesn't do any good, no matter what the calorie count says on the can/bottle.

So, the idea behind the "100 Day Challenge" is this: combine everything I Know that I Need to do to lose those 20-30 lbs and feel better as a rule instead of as an exception.

For the 100 day period of January 7 to April 16 I will try to achieve at least a 90% success rate in these specific areas of challenge:

• Getting enough sleep (7-8) hours per night
• Taking my vitamins
• Doing Yoga/Strength exercises every day
• Doing 30 minutes of Cardio at least 4 times a week
• Drinking at least 60 oz of water a day
• Cutting all coffee and pop (or soda or coke for those of you non-Ohioans)

....and the very, very hardest:

• Sticking to my Meal Plan

If it I am successful, well, then it will be time to decide what to do next. For now, I'm focusing on the short term. The blog will be for progress reports, funny anecdotes, success and failure stories, and various other colorful fun I'm making a list to include.

Also, because I'm an accountant, I will be counting my success with a fancy spreadsheet, and there may be charts and graphs. ;-)