I guess I run now

Indeed.

I’ve been a part of the W8 Challenge for a little over a month now & I figured I’d write a little bit about why I’m enjoying (& getting a lot out of) the challenge. Note: I’m not a paid endorser, just a happy user.

So the W8 is simple & free. You pick your daily food goals for the month & every day that you meet those personal goals, you get a gold star. You can only get one food-goal star a day, but you can get as many gold stars for exercise as you can manage.

For the exercise stars, you do what you normally consider exercise (for me that’s usually walking or walk/running), & you get a gold star for each hour you do that exercise every day. You can get a half star for a half hour of exercise, but there aren’t any fractions below that. This is actually one of the things I like best about the W8…if I’m at 45 minutes, there’s that incentive to keep going to round it out to a full hour.

& you’re “competing” with others in your group who are also busy earning as many stars as they can. Weird, but it works. Mostly, I’m competing with myself. I really wanted a red star this month (that’s the reward once you hit 50 gold stars), and so even though I’ll be traveling a lot this next week, I’m going to push myself to work out at least an hour a day to see if I can’t get to 50 before the end of the month.

Gold stars…not even real ones, virtual gold stars…it works for some reason.

So if you think you’re the type of person who would enjoy a little friendly competition/motivation, think about signing up to be a part of the challenge in July! It’s fun & it’s already motivated me to do 20 and a half hours of exercise this month…not too shabby, I think.

Today…
Breakfast: kashi & milk
Lunch: salad topped with 1/4 cup chicken salad (not homemade)
Dinner: leftovers of meatloaf with mashed & some snow peas.

Snack: 15 snap pea snacks

Exercise: 1.5 hour walk with the dog. 55-mins weeding the front garden & planting the last of the flowers. So, yeah, you better believe I dragged my poor tired knees & poor tired dog out for a 10-minute walk to round out the hour. Still have to finish the laundry & pack the car (these I don’t count for stars cause it’s not like a sustained activity). I’d like to get the car packed up tonight (books & files I’ll need on the research leg of the trip in July) so I can take a walk along the portage before I hit the road tomorrow morning.

Still working on my last pint of water & then I can record these glorious stars!