ahh, yes..my first week in the house and I'm afraid I didn't do so well. I also forgot to weigh myself this morning before I started eating! I will get numbers together and post in a little while.

Food: Earn 1 OWL for each day you drink at least 8 glasses of water
Exercise: Take 5 exercise breaks each day. Earn 1 OWL each day you take 5.
Spirit: Earn 1 OWL each day you drop by the common room and leave a post.

Inter-house challenge: Earn 1 House Point for each minute of exercise

For the week of 1/8:
Food: 0
Exercise: 0 (I exercised, but not in breaks - how long does an 'exercise break' need to be?)
Spirit: 3

House Points: 65

Morning. I just realized that TOM is going to arrive next week. Meanwhile this week I was wondering why my back started to hurt and feeling a bit bloated! ICK! I hate weighing in when TOM is here. It really adds pounds (close to 5 or more) in bloated weight. Anywho, I am staying on track and it looks like everyone else is doing well.

Have a great day all!

mish

OK, DON'T REPLY HERE, FOLKS! You can reply (it seems) but it continues to another thread at the bottom, too. It's very weird, but ONLY reply to the sticky thread called Ravenclaw Common Room Part 2, not the unsticky one!

Whoa...thanks for helping out with the thread change! I was totally lost, lol.

WhatsEatingYou, the original version of the Exercise Challenge is below, so you can possibly use this to judge whether you know you've done enough to qualify:

"Exercise: Take 5 exercise breaks each day. Work these in when you take a bathroom break, during commercials or whenever you can throughout the day. Do some squats, wall push-ups, sit-ups, jog in place - whatever you feel like doing. Earn 1 OWL each day you take 5."

You could potentially do as much as you want, but since commercial breaks were used an example, you could figure in 2-5 minutes for a commercial break, so if you did around 20-25 minutes of exercise, you could count that as your 5. Otherwise, you could push yourself and use your 20 minutes as one break and challenge yourself to work in 4 other mini-breaks during the day

I'd say it's your choice!

Thanks, Kelly. I think the point of that exercise break thing is probably just to get us thinking about being more active in regular activity, right? So I'm going to try to remember to actually do the breaks in addition to anything else..breaks are probably all I'll get in today, for instance, because it's gross outside!! Unless I somehow fit in a Curves session but I'm not confident about that..too many things to do while little one is in preschool that are in too many different parts of the county. Sigh!

Lottee, you rock!!

And thanks for the shoutout for wt loss last week (sorry now I forgot whose thread that was - will be easier when I have figured out who people are, I think, sorry!) -- I know it's that 'first week loss' but I will take it!! I was in the 260's last Spring, would like to get back to where I was as quick as possible so I can actually think of everything as weight loss -- right now I just think of it as catching up (down?) to where I was... Still, there have been two times in my life when weight just kind of 'came off' - one was when I was single and addicted to the gym, didn't track food but tracked how much I was lifting and how much time I was doing vairous thingsl...and the other times were when I was tracking food and exercise. So if I can just KEEP MYSELF TRACKING I should be all right.

Oh, and as long as I don't let myself get derailed by my husband's problems..which has been my pattern the last few years. I have to kind of 'give up' on him now to help myself. Know how they say to hang out with healthy people if you want to be healthy? Well, I'm married to a man who gave up on himself a few years ago and just 'lets' things happen to him now - he has diabetes and doens't watch, he has heart disease and doesn't exercise or take care, he is getting bigger which is worse for both of those things...so I need some MAJOR POSITIVE healthy energy to counteract what I live with here at home. Just don't tell me that when he sees my results it will motivate him - we've been there before, he doesn't get motivated, he gets jealous

Wow, that turned into a therapy post. Sorry! lol Long story short -- very glad to be here!! Don't have tons of time for all the message boards and such so you are my one conversational part of this experience for me, the only other thing I do here is track.

I'd like to ask a detail about the water - is that ONLY water or can other bevs count? I had six glasses of water-water yesterday, and three cups of coffee (I did see the discussion of coffee here - but when I have enough coffee I don't need my ritalin so I tend to coffee-up). That still counts as just six waters for challenge purposes? Or are there any other drinks that 'count' for that?

Thanks,
LA

Such a weird body-day. I spent half the morning feeling like I was starving- and thirsting- to death (after eating a normal breakfast and having had two cups of water plus a juice already), now that I had lunch I feel like I NEED to take a nap. Huh.

For the week of 1/8:
Food: 3/4
Exercise: 0/4
Spirit: 2/4

House Points: 230

Morning all!

Turns out, if you run at 5am one day, your body is awake at 5am the next day wanting exercise! I refuse to run two consecutive days because I know my shin-splints will come back if I'm not sensible, but I've just done some yoga instead. Nto sure I can handle 5am exercise every day though!

Mish3131- your post actually helped me, I was cursing because I'm up from Monday despite a fairly good week, however, it reminded me that TOM is due so hopefully that's why. Don't think this week's weigh in will be all that good though. THANKS! And well done for sticking with it!

Aszuzi and WhatsEatingYou... Well done (and I'm sorry to hear about it) for those of who with husbands who aren't supporting your weightloss and exercise. Kudos to you for doing it anyways though, not caving in is really impressive! Well done!

As for water, I agree water is the most important drink, and I try to get eight a day always. However, recently I've been seeing in the press a lot of stories about how you don't have to get all your water from, well, water. Mixed with squash (cordial), from food, in soda etc still counts, according to most of the stuff I've read. HOWEVER, relying on soda or squash will increase your sugar intake massively, and you can't judge from food, so I aim for eight a glasses of water a day to ensure that I definitely get enough. And you can't drink too much water!!! (unless you down like three litres in one go...

And finally SamiWhereAreYou... vegetarians... Gah! And I mean that in the nicest possible way. I agree with vegetarianism as a life choice, I've done it myself in the past, and many of my family are vegetarians still. However, those who preach to others, who judge us meat eaters, do my head in! It is a choice, it's nothing to do with loving animals (and, honestly, what's to love about a chicken?!) and everything to do with wanting a varied, balanced, interesting diet. And, (as a geography teacher...) If everyone was vegetarian, some 16 million people would lose their entire livelihoods, many in the poorest parts of the world, and without animal protein many more millions of already struggling people and babies would die of malnutrition. Gah, gets my goat!

Wow, bit of an essay, so to end on a reminder...

***IT'S FRIDAY!!!! WEIGH_IN WEEKEND STARTS NOW!!!*****