September Schedule of Challenges!

themedalist · August 2018

Are you ready for Fall? Hard to believe but September is knocking on the door. August is typically a very quiet month around here but I expect a lot of new members will be joining us in September. If you are new to our group, welcome! If you’d like to receive an email notification when a new weekly challenge is posted, send me an email to: buildinghealthyhabits2@gmail.com and I will add you to our email notification list.

I am so excited to launch our new monthly challenge series, “This Month I Will...” I’ll have a lot more to say about it in a few days, but we will be kicking off each month with a personalized challenge that we create for ourselves. These customized challenges will help us make regular progress on the goals that we have. And isn’t that why we’ve joined this Building Healthy Habits group? I can’t wait to get started!

Here’s what’s on the horizon for September:

Sept 3 – Sept 30: Theme: Healthy Practices
Challenge: “This September I Will...”
What’s your goal for September? What do you want to accomplish? What healthy habit do you want to focus on this month that will make your life better? We change our lives through our daily actions....let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work!

Sept 10 - Sep 16: Theme: Sharing Your Wisdom
Challenge: Nice to Meet You!
We have lots of new members joining us this month, so let’s do a round of introductions this week and share a little bit about ourselves!

Sept 17 - Sept 23: Theme: Healthy Eating
Challenge: Unsweetened
Sugar. So delicious and yet problematic for many of us. If you know you eat too much sugar and would like to cut back, join us this week as we will be sharing tips and strategies for taking some of that sugar out of our lives.

Sept 24 - Sept 30: Theme: Exercise and Movement is
Challenge: Balancing Act
How's your balance and stability? Balance is often overlooked as a critical element of health and fitness. Better balance improves coordination, joint stability, agility, reaction time, and prevents falls and fractures. And balance exercises are also good for your brain! Join us this week as we work on improving our balance.

themedalist · August 2018

Reading your “New Years in August” resolution posts was one of the drivers for the new monthly challenge series. Many of us haven’t made as much progress on our health and fitness goals as we’d like. I think a month-long focused effort will help. But I had another inspiration. I was listening to a Ted podcast recently called “A Better You” and one of the speakers, Matt Cutts, was just a regular guy who every month tries something different. He picks a specific action that he wants to try and does it every day for a month. Some of the things that he’s tried have become habits and some have not, but he never stops trying new things that he thinks might enrich his life. As he says in his talk, “You can do anything for 30 days“.

I love his idea and so this month I’ve been working on my own new habit. Because of my work on Quitting the Sitting, I follow a lot of like-minded groups on Twitter. Not only do they promote walking, but they also urge walking at a fast clip, something I’ve resisted. Because I have mild cerebral palsy, I walk with a limp and I don’t have the best balance. I worry about falling. But here’s the thing: my concern about falling is valid but I was also blowing it out of proportion and using it as an excuse. The truth is, I CAN walk a little faster and there are all kinds of health benefits to picking up the pace.

So starting on August 1, I’ve made a concerted effort to walk more quickly from Point A to Point B. I walk as if I’m late for something. At first, I had to remember to walk quickly, but now almost 4 weeks later, I do it automatically. It’s become a habit. My aerobic conditioning has improved as a result of this little tweak and a bonus: I get from Point A to Point B a little sooner. This new healthy habit of mine has required no additional time, it just took me a few weeks of focused attention. I am sold on the 30 day challenge concept and I’m already percolating ideas for September. I hope you’ll give it a chance as well and will fully participate in our “This September I Will… “ challenge.

Here’s Matt’s short talk: