Game On!

A friend of mine invited me to join in a challenge based on a book called The Game On Diet. The background of the book is that the authors are friends who came up with the game outlined in the book in order to help the female author to lose her pregnancy weight.

What I'll be participating in is a 4 week challenge from August 30 - September 19 with a group of people. We'll be divided up into teams of four, each person will kick $50 into the pot, and at the end the winning team will divvy up the money.

Personally, I'm joining in for the fun of the challenge and the kick in the pants I need in the motivation department. The weight-loss roll I was on tapered out in the spring and I've gone from a plateau to picking up 5 lbs, and since I'm still at least 40 lbs from my goal weight I need to get going again.

So what exactly is this game? The objective is to score as many points as possible. Each day you can score points by eating 5 meals consisting of approved foods, by exercising at least 20 minutes, by drinking 3 liters of water, by sleeping at least 7 hours, by picking up one good habit, by dropping one bad habit, and by keeping in touch with a team member and an opposing team member. There are also bonus points for things like losing 1% of your starting weight if your overall goal is weight loss or for meeting your fitness goal if your overall goal is improved fitness. There's also some wiggle room in taking breaks, so you can take a day off from each aspect either together or spread out over the week (i.e. one day I can ignore getting 5 hours of sleep and the next I can skip exercising).

I'm both totally excited and totally intimidated by this challenge. I'm looking forward to trying a new approach to smart weight loss and I know that being accountable for my choices is going to be a huge motivator. I'm also slightly panicky at the thought of being accountable to my teammates and being tied in to a "diet" ("lifestyle"?) for four weeks.

I think that my first hurdle is going to be making the time to plan out my eating while getting used to what falls into and approved meal (a meal needs to include a portion of carbs or fruits, of protein, and of fats and two of them have to include two servings of veggies). The other area where I might struggle is in my tendency to an all-or-nothing attitude. I'll need to remind myself that making a poor choice once during the day doesn't mean I need to make other poor choices after that.

I'm still trying to figure out what I should chose as my healthy habit to build and my unhealthy habit to quit. I might make taking my vitamins daily my healthy habit to keep things simple since building in 20 minutes of exercise 6 days a week is already going to take a bit of dedication for a Mom who rarely gets any personal time at all.

So anyhow, that's what's rattling around in my brain tonight. I've got one more day til things kick off and I'm really excited to see where it takes me. I'll make sure that I update along the way!