Challenge Extended ....

Hey everyone,

I have decided to extend and personally participate in a new challenge. It will start tomorrow (3/23) and end in 112 days (or 7/13). I am extending it because I seem to need a challenge of event to keep myself motivated and having it be a personal challenge isn't working anymore. I need to compete.

So here's how it will work:

I will be opening up a Paypal account and I will put in $10 every week. Anyone else who wants to participate may choose their weekly contribution based on your own desires. Simply put your contribution into the account every week and email me.

I (and anyone else who participates) will set a weekly goal which, if reached, will allow me to keep my contribution. I recommend setting a process - based goal rather than a results - based goal. That means that I am going to reward myself for doing the things that lead to change rather than basing my success on losing a certain amount of weight. You can decide what your goals are but keep in mind that there are so many factors that affect weight that it would stink to lose your contribution because of something silly like not losing two pounds due to eating Chinese food and retaining water.

My personal challenge will be to log ALL of my food EVERY day and to stay under 2400 calories every day. That is what is going to get me to my goal. I am also going to be cutting out sodas, eating out and "junk food" but I want people to know that it is not necessarily to get me to my fitness goals. As I have said before in this blog that I don't believe that certain foods keep people from their fat loss goals. I am mostly doing it because I have noticed that a) my daughter is now looking at and becoming interested in everything Mommy is doing and it is not going to be long before she really starts to mimmic me. I want to develop better habits for her sake b) I spend more money when I drink sodas and eat out and I don't make good decisions when I do and c) I don't tend to remember what I ate in order to log correctly when I eat "junk food". I will, however, have a fast food backup plan. It is better to eat SOMETHING every 3-4 hours than to go without eating just because I can't eat the "right" thing.  So I will have a backup for every meal at McDonald's and Starbucks but it has to be because I would otherwise have to go without eating.

There will be make-ups. For example, if I do have a slip up and eat 2600 calories one day, I can make it up the next day by doing an extra 50 mins of cardio. I have to do it within 2 days of the slip up or I forfeit that week's contribution to the account. I will stay accountable by doing weekly blog posts for everyone in the competition to read about. Anyone else who would like to participate may email me at kerri.allyson@gmail.com every week before Friday evening to let me know how you are doing with your own goals. I will contact anyone I haven't heard from for a week but if I go two weeks without hearing from you, I will assume you have quit and put all of your contributions into the forfeit pool (unless of course I hear later that there was a legitimate excuse).

At the end of the challenge, I hope to get 100% of the $160 I will be contributing to the account to put towards a prize for myself. However, if I didn't complete my challenge three out of the 16 weeks, I will only get back $130. $30 will be forfeit. What happens to that money? Well anyone who completes their personal challenges every week (this will have to be on the honor code) will get to split my forfeit cash. If everyone has a few slip - up weeks, meaning that no one was 100%, then the top 3 challengers will get to split the cash. 1st place will get half of it, 2nd place will get a third and 3rd place will get the remaining 20%. So everyone will get their money back, some will forfeit a contribution here or there, some may earn extra but you basically have to quit in order to lose it all.

I am personally motivated by being in a competition. I like to be accountable to others and proving to them that I can accomplish something. If even one other person joins me I am fairly certain I will be almost 100%. If there is the potential of losing something, my efforts will likely double. I hope that this is a good idea and a lot of people would like to participate with me.

If you are one of those people, I am giving you until Friday, April 3rd to join. You can join by simply emailing me with your weekly goal and your weekly contribution. If you need help deciding on a process-based goal, let me know and I would love to help you out. From there, simply do your thing and email me once a week to let me know how it is going. I'll be posting my progress as well.