If you missed my post from last week introducing the MSF Wellness Challenge, read it here.
It has now been about a week since I posted about my primary personal goals for the new year. They revolve around reversing some bad eating and exercise habits to get back in shape and feeling healthy again. I decided it would be fun, and also increase my accountability, if I blogged about my progress and encouraged you all to share your goals and progress too. That is the MSF Wellness Challenge in a nutshell: all of us making moderation, salubrity, and fitness central parts of our daily lives.
My short-term goal for last week was to get back to being a disciplined eater. To do so, I put my account at MyNetDiary.com back to good use and tracked everything I ate. As expected, this made me more accountable to myself, decreased my random snacking (because, I’ll be honest, it’s annoying tracking everything you eat), and led to an overall decrease in the number of calories I ate while not leaving me feeling deprived.
What I like about MyNetDiary is that it helps you set and track reasonable short-, mid-, and long-term weight loss goals. My long-term goal is to get under 190 pounds by my birthday this year, July 14th. After doing my first official weigh-in this morning, I found that I am 227 pounds. That is less than the 230 pounds I feared, but still far, far more than I’ve ever weighed before. I entered this into MyNetDiary, along with my target, and found out that I need to lose 1.5 pounds per week to achieve my long-term goal. MyNetDiary then translated this into a daily calorie number that I can consume: 2,602. Now, as I track my food consumption each day, I’ll be able to make sure that I stay within that daily range.
Now that I am getting on the right track in terms of moderation, at least with respect to eating, my next goal is to re-introduce regular fitness into my daily regiment. The goal here will be to do some kind of serious, focused workout at least six days a week. I want to be more active in general, but my accountability measurement will be getting the workout clothes on, busting out the mp3 player, and doing some kind of weight or cardio (usually both) workout every day but one. That way I give myself a little bit of a buffer zone in case a day gets away from me and I can’t workout; also, it’s good to have a recovery day, especially when doing serious work lifting weights. I’ll keep you posted on how this goes.
Public Weigh-Ins
One accountability strategy that I have seen a lot of people use is posting their weight on Twitter with hashtags like #tweetyourweight. This is a strategy that is helpful for a lot of people, because posting your weight publicly can help motivate you to get the number lower. For others, doing this might not mean much of anything. If you are in the first group, and you think that posting your weight regularly could help motivate you, I’ll lead the charge. Not only will I be posting my weight in each of these MSF Wellness Challenge updates, but I’ll also tweet it out regularly with the following hashtags: #tweetyourweight and #msfwellnesschallenge. That way we can be part of the larger Twitter movement, as well as starting our own smaller group.
Here is my first weigh-in tweet and here is the #msfwellnesschallenge hashtag if you want to follow along that way.
And remember, we are still ironing out the details for how the challenge will work in terms of “keeping score” as well as what kind of prize to have for a “winner”. If you have ideas, post them below along with your progress. Let’s make this as fun as possible while we hold eachother accountable to our goals.
About Jerod Morris
