Let's Do this! - 2019 Challenge - Be the best you can be!

@christinarandolph3 - absolutely, welcome to the challenge

@fitness327wk - congratulations on the weight loss.

@looneyhiker - congratulations on your additional weight loss. I am where you were last week, with the water weight. After you talked about having Chinese food, I have been craving it since then, so I had some yesterday, and actually retained over 2 lbs of water weight. I hope it comes off as quickly for me as it did for you.

Hi Everyone,

I hope you are all doing well. This week my office started the Win by Losing challenge with our Healthcare provider. I joined the challenge and hope to contribute to the teams total loss for the 10 week program.

One thing I am doing to challenge myself during this program is to started standing more at work, and tracking exactly how long I stand. Most employees have a VariDesk that allows you to raise up your keyboard and monitors so that you can continue to work while standing. I was already standing at work, but not consciously making sure I stand for a specific period of time during the day, and some days I wouldn’t stand at all. This week I stood for a minimum of 3.5 hours up to 5 hours per day. I hope to get to the point where I can stand for 6-8 hours a day on a consistent basis.

I also haven’t updated my spreadsheet for a couple of weeks, but I will sit down tomorrow and update it to see if I am on track to beat averages from January. I also want to review my Beat My Best Challenge and see if I can fit in a Challenge day between now and the end of the month.

Good Morning Everyone,

I did my longest run so far today at over 7 miles, and I have been slowly increasing my run time between mini walk breaks. I am currently running 12 minutes and then walking 3, but tomorrow I will increase that to 15 minutes and walk 5 minutes.

The main reason I am increasing the walking is for easy of know when to start the next segment. Plus, from here on out I plan on increasing my run segments by 5 minutes at a time, and it is a nice easy cut off to have a 5 minute break between running segments. I will continue to add 5 minutes each week to my running segments until I am running the whole workout. Understand that I typically do a walking warm-up for 10 minutes before I start running and at least a 10 minute walking cool down before I stop moving. I always stretch after my workout, never before.

Over the next month or so I am going to try to regain the flexibility I use to have. Since I went so long without exercising I lost a lot of flexibility, so I hope to regain some of that in hopes to have it help with my future workouts. I will also be doing more strength work over the coming weeks. I have already started a plank challenge, where I will slowly increase the time I hold a plank. I started this past week with holding the plank for 15 seconds and then taking a short break then doing it again for 15 seconds. Today, I increased to 20 seconds. I plan to slowly increase this time over the next few weeks up to 1-2 minutes.

In addition, I am also starting to work my other muscles more. Arms, right now doing sudo push-ups, and eventually legs, doing squats. I haven't exactly decided how I am going to work these into my workout routine, but I want to start strengthening my entire body, but just my cardiovascular abilities with running.

How is everyone else doing with their workouts? Have you been slowly increasing your intensity? What have you done to vary your workout so that you body doesn’t adapt and plateau.

@loonyhiker, LOL! typo! Congratulations on losing another pound and being at your lowest in a year. That is awesome. I downloaded a couple of those walking videos to keep on my iPad in case of emergency.

Slow and steady as it goes. I have only lost 2 lbs since the beginning of February, but I am still very happy with it. My goal was to lose 10 lbs by the end of March, and I have done that already, so any extra will just be a jump start on the next 3 months.

They say that losing weight is 80% diet 20% exercise, and I know if I was more strict with my diet I would lose weight more quickly, however, I also love food and KNOW that I won’t be able to stick to a strict diet for very long and in the end I would just end up bingeing and gain the weight back like I have always done.

Even though I am not restricting what I am eating or counting calories, I am being conscious of what and how much I am eating. I feel as if I need to lose this weight in a fashion that I would be comfortable continuing long term and for me that is not a restricted diet. All in moderation right.

I know at some point I will stop losing, and it is at that point that I might have to step up the game a bit for that final push, but at least I will know it will be very short lived just to get over the hump/plateau.

Today, I had a great run. I am up to running 15 minutes then walking for 5 minutes and repeat until the end of the workout. Today’s workout felt very relaxed, and I felt like I could definitely run longer. I will bump up my running to 20 minutes come Sunday, and I think I will add in an extra day of running next week also. that will bring me up to 5 days of running, where as I have only been doing 4 since the beginning of January.