biggest loser

At the first of the year some friends of mine started a biggest loser competition. Since I was still carrying an extra 20lbs and needed a little extra motivation to quit eating so much junk I decided to join. It has been really good for me. The best part of the competition for me is that we have 3 daily goals and we can get a point for keeping each goal every day. This helps to break down the long term goal to something I can think about each day. My goals are no sweets, except on date night and muscle building exercise every day. I can do these everyday rain or shine, with kids sick, home or suspended or whatever. (circumstances sometimes cause me to miss the good cardio workout). We also have 1 non physical goal. Mine has been to read the scriptures before I turn on the computer each day. This had been something on my mind for a while. I knew that my priorities were off since I was waking up and hopping on the computer (email, facebook, etc.) when I knew this was not the most important thing to do with my morning. It is better to put first things first and make sure the most important things are done. It is amazing how simple this is and yet how hard it can be to do sometimes. Our stake president gave a message at conference recently talking about how truly simple it is to do what we need to do and yet difficult to follow through with what we know we should be doing.

We are now almost 4 weeks into the competition and I have been having a great time. So far I have lost 5% of my body weight (I need to lose at least 5% more) and have gotten my 3 points each day except for 1 day when I ate ice cream. (So yummy but not at all worth losing a point over).

I am glad to have had this chance to get my scripture reading habit back into place. Our ward started a 100 day reading of the book of mormon and gave each member a little notebook to tell us what to read each day. This has prevented me from "cheating" and just reading a few verses on the days when I felt I was too busy to read.

Putting the scriptures before the computer has been a good lesson to me also is hopefully helping me form a good habit - one which I really haven't kept up since college - of reading early in the morning for 20 minutes or so. Since I do not work and am not required to use the Internet for anything it has also been a very good change to only get on the computer once or twice a day, and only when scriptures are done. I realize that my email is not as important as I thought it was and I can generally do every thing I need to do in just a few minutes in the afternoon or evening.

For my records. It took me about 4 days of headache and "toxic hunger" in the first week to get over being STARVING for junk food. After that first week it is not as difficult. Well, it is still difficult to not eat whatever I feel like eating, but at least it doesn't hurt!