Challenges

The countdown is at a week.  One week to 40!  In the past couple of weeks though I have begun some positive habits:  I started work on a writing project and actually have a plan forward for it, I have settled some outstanding work loose ends and I started a health and wellness challenge.  Today's post is about the latter.

In the age of reality television, shows like The Biggest Loser have inspired lots of workplace and social media weight loss challenges.  America is simultaneously overweight and freakish about diet & exercise (you really have to work hard to achieve both).

I don't have the option for a work place challenge as I work at home, so I devised a long distance challenge with 4 friends (the 5 of us pictured above).  We live in 5 different states, we became friends on Twitter as the result of a common favorite TV show and we recently met face-to-face for the first time (the 21st century rocks).

As you can see from the photo we are all different shapes and sizes, so we needed to customize a challenge that worked for all of us.  Here are the simple guidelines:

1. By Monday July 7th we all recorded a goal on our phones note pad that is date stamped.  The goal can be whatever we want it to be, a # of lbs, a % of body weight, a dress size, a 5K, eating only organic veggies -- whatever we want to achieve by our show's Finale in mid-November.

2.  Through the 5 months we take pics as evidence of our accomplishments (weight on the scale, 2 pieces of clothing in different sizes, food porn of awesome veggie dishes) and hold on to them until November.

3.  We each commit to sending 1 encouragement gift of approx. $10 per person, so a $50 commitment (but everyone will get 5 gifts), we can each pick a month to send the gifts.  The gift can be anything encouraging or pampering as long as it does not sabotage our goals (no boxes of Godivas :) ) Could be a book, a pair of awesome socks, nail polish for a pretty pedi, ITunes gift cards for music, stuff like that.

4.We continue to send encouraging and fun Tweets and Texts and FB posts, etc. (NOTE: We started a private FB page so we could chat with abandon -- a great suggestion from another friend).  We are going to run clever hashtag contests on Twitter with ITunes tracks as prizes and bring in more ideas from social media.

5.  If we are lucky enough to be together for the Finale we bring all the evidence of our accomplishments and if we are sadly not together we can do a virtual reveal.

 

 

There are lots of cool ways to utilize social media for health and wellness.  Do you have any cool ideas?  Would love to hear them!