6 Week Challenge

A few months ago, I signed up for a website called NerdFitness. It's definitely for nerds (like me) and it's set up like a video game, probably so that we don't feel too much out of our element. The concept is great and if you remember my Fitocracy post, studies have shown a correlation between those who excel at video games and those who excel at fitness.

Anyway, NerdFitness does these 6-week challenges, where you set up a challenge thread on the forums for yourself. You pick three diet/fitness goals and one life goal and at the end of the 6 weeks, those participants who were determined by the other members to be the "winner" (by the highest success toward your personal goals) wins a t-shirt.

I signed up for this go-around and it's my first challenge, so I'm pretty pumped about it. The three diet/fitness goals that I chose were:

1) maintain a 100% paleo diet (I post my paleo recipes here)
2) lose 10 lbs of body fat
3) learn to run 2 miles

and my lifestyle goal is to read 15 books for my book review blog, starting with "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence" (which I'm half-way through).

Once I got to reading some of the other challenge threads - some of those people go hard or go home - I decide to add another little test to mine. Since my overall goal is to improve my general fitness level, I decided to test out how many push-ups and crunches I could do without stopping and how long I could hold a plank. I logged them and I'm going to try it again every day to see how much I can improve in 6 weeks.

My initial numbers were:
kneeling push-ups: 31
crunches - 50
plank - 30.1 seconds

Today is day 3 of the challenge, and I'm making decent progress. I even decided to take a few pics to judge my physical appearance progress. Here they are - shield your eyes! :P

I'll keep you all posted on the progress as it goes along. Personal improvement is the name of the game right now!

If you're a member of Nerdfitness, you can follow my thread. My username is "epaleocookbooks". 

A Cool Way to Control Portion Size

While talking to people, I find that although a lot of them eat fairly healthy food, they tend to wreck it by eating massive portions. My roommate is the worst about it. He eats pretty well, but then he'll come home craving mac 'n cheese, and decide that since he ate well all week, he could afford the treat. But then he eats the entire pot in one sitting.

I too am a mac 'n cheese fan, and I recently came across this really cool way to make sure that you only eat a small portion. You can bake your mac 'n cheese (or other things, like meatloaf) in a muffin tin! Then you only get a muffin-sized portion. Plus, it looks kind of fancy. :)

It's easy to do. Just prepare any mac n' cheese recipe (Rocco Dispirito has a good low cal one), but cook your noodles two minutes less than the recipe instructions. Then, spoon your mixture into your muffin tin, sprinkle with panko bread crumbs and back at 350 for 15-20 minutes. Let it sit for 10 minutes before removing them from the pan with a spatula. Voila!

Cute, right?

Words of Wisdom

I saw this today on Pinterest and I thought it was worth a share. :)

I think I'm going to print it out and stick it on the fridge!

365 Project - A Great Motivational Tool

Let me start by saying, "Happy New Year!"

Do you make resolutions? If you do, have you made yours yet?

I made mine, and I didn't make just one. I made two. One is to finally FINALLY learn to run, and I swear I'm going to follow through on this one! The other is to work on my art more.

To make sure I follow through on these, I'm turning a popular project idea into a motivational tool. The project is called The 365 Project, and people do all kinds, but the basic concept is that you do something every day for 365 days. Some people cook a new recipe everyday, some take pictures of certain things, some create new art everyday (which is what I'm doing).

So, whatever your New Years resolution is, you can adapt it to a 365 model to ensure you keep with it. If your resolution is to eat healthier, try one new healthy meal every day for a year. If it's to exercise more, make yourself get out there and do something athletic every day. Then, create a blog to track your progress.

If you're cooking healthier meals, take pictures to post on your blog. If you want to be more active, blog about how what you did and how you feel. Having that record will keep you accountable, and may even motivate others to do the same.

For example, my second resolution was to work on my arts and crafts more. I'd like to improve my skill, and being creative helps keep my mind active. So, I started an art blog to post what I do everyday. If you want to check it out and get some ideas, the address is http://feelingartsy.wordpress.com

My other resolution is to learn to run, which if you follow this blog, you'll know that running is my arch nemesis. For the next 365 days, I'm going to force myself to go out once a day and just run as far as I can. I'm not going to set any goals other than to try it everyday, and hopefully, by this time next year, I'll be an Olympic track star. :)