ohhhhhh, those look DELICIOUS !!! WELL DONE !! Nice job on your weigh-in, Jackie :).

We did have lots of fun this weekend. Bonfire dinner birthday celebration on Friday, Dinner date with daughter and niece on Sunday, Brunch date with 3 friends earlier on Sunday. I tried jackfruit for the first time on Sunday - bbq jackfruit. Never have encountered it before. It was listed as one of the protein options, along with ham, sausage, turkey sausage, bacon, etc It was pretty good ! I'm not sure it's a significant protein source tho, when I logged it, it was only 1g of protein?

It sounds like you had a great beach conference / vaction, Lauren!

Great loss @jguldi11 ! Keep it up. How cool to have canned so much applesauce. Yum.

I logged all my food today. Hit my step goal. Today was a good day. I have tomorrow off.

Still need to get some exercise in. Maybe tomorrow being off.

Yesterday was almost good, I ate breakfast, I ate lunch, I had an appointment after work, I ate dinner, then I cleaned the kitchen and started some laundry, then I sat down waiting for the Ravens game to come on, and those stupid barbeque fritos from camping were calling my name, so I ate some of them, I did throw the rest away though. Those aren't something I actually even buy to just eat, but when I eat hot dogs, I put them on my hot dogs, they are so yummy, with the hot dog, mustard and relish, LOL. So I always buy a bag when camping. So it doesn't even make sense why I ate them.

I could not exercise last night because my appointment was for botox, and you aren't supposed to exercise after it, but honestly who am I kidding, I don't think I do the exercise they are talking about, so it was just an excuse I made for myself.

Anyway, new day. Today I am going to do a 10 minute video and 15 minutes of pilates/yoga, it's been a while, so I am not going to try the whole 30 minutes.

conleywoods - Wow what kind of women would do that? Good for your husband to set boundaries hope she gets the hint. She must be dealing with something.

Pearl4686 - hope you are feeling better and can get down to the root of the issue

jguldi11 Wow busy weekend - I've been canning too. Mostly pickles

lauren_989 Thanks for sharing your pics - the trip sounded lovely.

mkksemail - I tried Jackfruit this summer and it was delish but didn't know it's a protein source.

I've been so absent here the last 6 weeks. My foot is finally starting to heal but not able to do all the activity I want. Funny thing is that I'm losing weight even though my activity is less and I don't think I"m eating less. I have a feeling it's because I'm less stressed from work. Has anyone noticed when they are stressed their weight goes up? Anyway I'll take it

PW 162.4

CW 161

Michele ….. omg sooooo cute !!!

That 4min interval is echoing that article about the Norwegian protocol that I posted!! I have some stuff going on, and getting ready to head to NY in a few days, so I can't join now, but if you're still dancin in 2 weeks, I'm your girl ! Xx

Hey all, just a quick check in

@lauren_989 That's a simple but powerful message. I often get stuck in the mindset of "everyone else is doing it". Sure, but I don't see their choices for the rest of the day. The other snacks they skip. The wine they don't drink. The binges they don't have. The rigorous exercise they perform. So, whatever happens, you're right - it's not a reflection of what's going on around me, it's a reflection of the individual choices I make.

We are meeting up at a place tonight we are looking to get a boat slip. It is a club so you will have restaurant access and other stuff. Might be a good way to meet people and only a 10 minute walk from our house so easy access to boating.

Drinking in the positivity and inspo! My Fitbit battery has been wonky lately. Today when I woke up, it was completely dead, even tho it was fully charged yesterday :/. Plus in February, it started 'eating' my steps. Ahhhh what to do, what to do!?

I bought a backup Fitbit a couple yrs ago, I just can't find it, tho :p.

Someone from my BLC team started a personal 'Winter Arc Challenge', which I'd never heard of before, but has quite a lot of similarities to our little 'Sprint to the New Year' intra-mural Bingo Boards and Wkly Goals challenge going on. I didn't want to start another challenge, since I just started this one, so I'm kinda 'following along' using our 'Sprint to the New Year'. I just made a long explanatory post & update post there, It occurred to me that I wanted to share it here with my teamies ❣. Apologies in advance for the verbosity. Text bomb incoming! ~ mk Xx

mkksemail  4:13PM

Hello fellow challengers! I didn't hear about a Winter Arc challenge until I googled it after this group was created:

AI OverviewThe Winter Arc Challenge is a self-imposed 3-month period, typically from October to January, focused on personal development and habit formation, especially health and fitness, rather than waiting for the new year to make resolutions. Participants set specific goals, like waking up early or exercising regularly, to build discipline and achieve their aspirations by the time the new year begins. It flips the traditional start of self-improvement, using the slower, colder months as an opportunity for intentional growth and progress. Key Aspects

• Timing: The challenge focuses on the last few months of the year, often from October to January. 
• Goal-Oriented: It involves setting personal goals in various areas, such as:
  • Fitness: Waking up early, exercising consistently, or going to the gym. 
  • Health: Adopting healthier eating habits. 
  • Mental Health: Practicing mindfulness, reading, or journaling. 
  • Learning: Developing new skills. 
• Discipline & Consistency: A core principle is to establish healthy habits and maintain discipline during a time when people often "hibernate" or slow down. 
• Proactive, Not Reactive: The challenge encourages a proactive approach to self-improvement, getting a head start on goals instead of waiting for a New Year's resolution. 
• Personalized: The goals and specifics of the challenge are flexible and tailored to each individual's aspirations. 

Why it's Popular

• Early Start: It provides a 90-day head start on New Year's goals, leveraging the time to make real progress. 
• Habit Formation: The 3-month timeframe is seen as sufficient for establishing new, lasting habits. 
• Combats End-of-Year Slump: It helps counter the tendency to become less active or motivated during the colder, darker months. 
• Positive Mindset Shift: The challenge reframes the slower winter season into a period of intense focus and positive action. 

This almost exactly mirrors what I embarked on with a handful of my Fat2Fit teamies, at the end of August:


mkksemail  MemberAugust 20

I've had my fingers, eyeballs, nose, and hands buried in a Bingo game I've been playing with the structure for, on and off, for a few months. Tying it into a goal-categories tracker idea from another place, and a freggie tracker I built to track my Hogwarts Unbreakable Vow, that I'd like to tie in, as well. Something about fall always feels like a time to get after it, for me.

Anyone have any interest in a little intra-mural Bingo board - goal plucking with me, come September? We could have a unified spreadsheet, with a built-out individual page for each member of our team to curate, personalize, organize, play with. The idea is, you flesh out your own (three) monthly Bingo Boards with whatever goals you really want to (or think you can) accomplish. I love crossing off lists, so it definitely rings my bell ;-).

And then the below-bingo-section, other color-coded section, is built out thematically to four goal areas, building on another teammate's 2025 Vision Verse that includes Power goals (exercise), Self-Discipline goals (nutrition), Love goals (Self-improvement, self-help), and Other / Joy goals (for things that take longer than a week, or are aspirational or meaningful things for you, etc etc. I absolutely loved the theme and color scheme she built, and I expanded it, with Chat GPT's help, to cover 12 weeks of vision verse themes in the same vein.

It's a couple weeks 'til the new Board starts (I'm mid-summer-5-wk interim break board right now), but you know, it could be fun. Maybe. Possibly. lmk what you guys think :D. ~ mk :)

When I proposed it, it was a 3-mo endeavor, but it morphed into a 'Sprint to the New Year' 18-wk Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec challenge :). For September and October, I'm using a set of Hogwarts-inspired Bingo tasks one of my Slytherin Housemates posted:

• September Bingo, snapshot board
• - Hogwarts inspired tasks

• September Bingo,
• detail / working board, part 1

• September Bingo,
• detail / working board, part 2

• October Bingo, snapshot board
• - Hogwarts inspired tasks

• October Bingo,
• detail / working board, part 1

• October Bingo,
• detail / working board, part 2

The structure of my challenge is spreadsheet-based, and my goal in embarking on this challenge was to focus on my goals, which broadly-speaking, are to improve sleep, lose weight, gain muscle, support my failing knees, and improve flexibility and functional fitness. I've wanted, since not-too-long after I got my Fitbit, to collate all the data into a form that I could use, process, blend, disect, and understand what were the important variables for me, to help achieve my goals.

This is a recent update I shared in another place:

My steps have been abominable the last couple weeks, I've been buried in my spreadsheet. Really loving it, btw, hopefully today or tomorrow I'll be done updating the goals section to make spaces to gather all my MFP and FB data. There's way too much, I've been wanting to have something to gather it for a couple yrs now, but the prospect was always daunting, bc it's a big lift. I realized in August the boards I was working on were really well-suited for it, so when I was reworking the sheet to pivot from a Wed-Tue, 5-wk structure to a Sun-Sat, 18-wk structure, I decided to go for it.

I have the MFP data section built, currently pairing key metrics to  https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/home/leaving?allowTrusted=1&target=https%3A%2F%2Ftdeecalculator.net%2F   metrics, for comparison (calorie levels, and macro numbers, for different activity levels). For example, for calorie levels, this is what it says for me (these are 'maintenance' level calorie budgets, for 'cutting', a 500 calorie deficit gets subtracted from all but Basal Metabolic Rate):

My MFP calorie budget is set to 'Lightly Active' and 'cutting' (500 cal/day deficit), which is 1,630 cals/day (which adjusts down on days that I am less active, and adjusts down on days that I am more active).

Anyway, that's just one example. :)

Next is Fitbit Data, and the layers of it. How to gather it has stumped me every time I've tried it, previously. But I finally realized, all I need to do is input the data as it's presented, with spaces for secondary/tertiary layers of data, as it comes up in my Fitbit dashboard. No need to make the data into a report, I just need the data. I can link to particular metrics as it becomes apparent which ones I need to strive to pay closer attention to, to meet or improve, as the case may be. I'm super looking forward to uploading 4 mos of data to Chatty, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity, in January, to see what patterns it spots!

BTW, what is your minimum protein goal? The TDEE website has some pretty high protein goals, for various eating/activity patterns! (Almost all of which are higher than my goal, which is kinda sorta fuzzy - it used to be 100g/day or 20% of cals from proteins, but when I lost half of my weight loss goal a couple yrs ago, I had dropped it to 75g/day or 20% of cals from proteins. I should have reset it higher when I had to start over, but I never did. Really hesitant about high protein diet bc of adverse effects from Atkins diet, back in the day (kidney stones ow!).

~ mk :) Xx

(Off-topic aside: turned out my abominable steps were more than not moving. My Fitbit started 'eating steps' in February. Literally a few thousand logged steps would be gone a few hours later. Super annoying! Seemed to be happening to lots of folks all around the same time, in late Jan / early Feb, if Redditors are a good gauge. I finally made my peace with it, but then my battery started draining super fast. I woke up this morning (it had a full charge yesterday), with a dead Fitbit Sense battery. Sense's are supposed to have up to a week on a battery charge, so that is NOT normal. I think it has expired - it's been on the charger all morning, but no signs of life. sigh).

I started this venture as part of a 5-wk break challenge my BLC team had on during the month of August. What I noticed during this time (I was building out the goals weekly boards throughout the month, so no complete data), was:

• my sodium intake jumping, and
• being annoyed that my MFP 'Snacks' category was not useful, in that it collected both day time snacking, and late night snacking' while looking back at data, it wasn't always clear if the snacking was bc of workouts, or bc of staying up too late :p.

On the sodium jump: I attributed it to holiday-making throughout August, and less-than-stellar food choices. Not making my sodium goal persisted into September tho, and I finally realized my usual morning hot beverage of 20z hot water, with an Irish Breakfast Tea steeped, then 1/2 serving of Orgain Protein Powder, & 1 scoop (not quite a full serving) of nonfat dry milk changed at the beginning of August when I ran out of nonfat dry milk powder for the first time in the 3 yrs I've been drinking protein tea, so decided to just use the full serving of protein powder instead. Turns out, Orgain is preeeetttyyy high in sodium, and having a few full servings of it per day was making meeting my sodium goal impossible, even tho I do not add salt to my food, or cook with salt. …. I noticed this, but it's now almost October, and I haven't fixed the problem yet. 🤦‍♀️

On the snack category: I had two Vits/Meds/Supps categories. MFP lets you have up to 6 different Meals Categories. I had B - L - D - S - AM meds/vits/supps - PM meds/vits/supps. Silly, and not very useful. So I collapsed the Vits into 1 meal category, and added post-20:00 Snacks instead. For now, I'm just collecting data and noticing. We'll see what shakes out.

My still-coalescing plan is to use Sep, and maybe Oct just for noticing, collecting, building my weekly data pts tracker formulas, hopefully becoming more intentional in Nov and Dec, and being on a solid road once my 'Sprint to the New Year' comes to a close. I'm possibly considering embarking on a 1-yr Thinner, Leaner, Stronger strength-training for women challenge, but I'm not sure.

I'm for-sure going to pursue a more intentional strength-training program. I've been using the same 12-exercise PTEs program for my knees, and the same 2 weights-machines circuits (lower body, and upper body/core) at Planet Fitness (put together by the included/free personal trainer services there), since Feb '24. I engaged in a few/several/many ;-) months of 'fight me' in this endeavor, so I don't want to give the impression I've been solidly Strentgh Training since February, bc I haven't. What I have done, tho, is continued to pursue it, albeit imperfectly.

My intention is to upload my collected MyFitnessPal and Fitbit data to Chat GPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity, at the end of my 'Sprint', to see what they can spot in terms of variables that I should be focusing on. AIs are supposed to be fantastic at pattern analysis. Looking forward to seeing what they see 👀.

Any way !! That was long! But this Winter Arc exactly jams with my Sprint to the New Year, so I'm excited about it. I can't maintain 2 sets of spreadsheets, so much of my activity will be with my F2F team, but I'm delighted to join you dedicated fellow travellers on your Winter Arc 🌼🙋‍♀️❣ Here is a static (non-functional) copy of the Directions page, and my page, of the 'Sprint to the New Year' challenge:

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/home/leaving?allowTrusted=1&target=https%3A%2F%2Fdocs.google.com%2Fspreadsheets%2Fd%2F1Cn8Y_ZAQlipWr-krUSdRLBJfjxj9hmZHA9_99oSZLGY%2Fedit%3Fgid%3D1239173296%23gid%3D1239173296

mkksemail 5:55PM

I guess I'm not quite doing a Winter Arc. That's okay, I'll still travel along with all y'all :).

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/home/leaving?allowTrusted=1&target=https%3A%2F%2Fakhabarindia.com%2Fwinter-arc-challenge%2F

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/home/leaving?allowTrusted=1&target=https%3A%2F%2Fsportztars.com%2Fwhat-is-the-winter-arc-challenge-the-guide-you-need%2F

Food logged ✅
6,000 steps ✅
Dance 4 minutes ✅ Celebration

Thanks for the comments on my little granddaughter. She’s a cutie. 🥰

Tomorrow is my long day.

oh, ps, Jackie, that Bingo board functinality is pretty neat, I have to agree! I used ChatGPT as a tutor to teach me how to do that 😎😱😊. I admit to geeking out on it. It's so satisfying to have the boards 'color themselves in tho'. It tickles me, and motivates me heh

Hi guys!

May I please be excused for next week?

I am heading to NY on Sat night, for a week. I may be able to check-in, maybe not. Depends on what's going on. Sunday is my sister's birthday - a day of hot tub soaking, visiting, drinking, laughing, and catching up is on deck , that I know for sure ;-).

TY! ~ mk :)

@lauren_989 @ashleycarole86