Peak313 “21 Days”

Peak313 has another challenge for us this month.  It’s called 21 Days to a Hunger-Free {and Healthy} Holiday.

Pulled from the website: “Here’s how it rolls: Starting Monday, December 2nd, I am going to ask you to make a sacrifice so you can SHARE with someone else less fortunate this season! Every time you choose to say NO to an unhealthy habit or YES to a healthy one, I want you to pay yourself! Put this money in a jar and at the end of the 21 days, you’ll donate that to a charity of your choice!“

I did start this last week but never got around to posting about it.   I have found that I don’t do as well when I focus on the negative – Don’t do this, Don’t eat that.  So I’m limiting my “NO” to just one, but I set up several positive goals.  I set a goal that for each one of these I would donate 25¢ to a charity:

• no soda for the day
• 8+ cups of water
• 8+ hours of sleep
• exercise for at least 10 min a day
• take a multivitamin
• floss
• earn SparkPeople points

Some of these I’ve just gotten out of the habits of making myself do them, so it was a good place to remind myself every day.

I took a break from tracking on SparkPeople over the last couple of months.  But I want to get back to it because even if I can’t seem to squeeze in exercise, tracking my food seems to help keep me focused.  I’ve talked about SparkPeople some before.  The points you earn are just for fun.  But as you increase your points, you earn trophies (again, just for fun).  It’s amazing how motivating it can be – to see the number of points go up, to get your rewards, to see how long your points streaks can hold out, etc.

To help motivate me in tracking, I decided that every 25 SP points I earned would equate to another quarter donated.

Good idea in theory but oh, boy … today is really going to bump up my donation for next week.  You see they revised the dashboard a short while ago, making it easier to see more options at once.  They also added some new points options like the ability to “give points” to the groups you are joined to.   It’s not that you lose or give points to those groups – basically, you can earn one to five “votes” for your groups each day; and when you select those groups you earn more points.  Well, today I hit the jackpot.  I earned 5 votes, clicked on one, and got 20 more points.  Clicked on another and got just 1.  No biggie.  Clicked on the next three:  20, 50, and 20!!  It’s early in the morning, I haven’t tracked any food yet and already I have over 170 points racked up!

So how did I do in the first week?  Much better than expected.  I have $10.75 to donate!  I’d have even more if I could get to sleep on time! 🙂

In case you’re curious as to how I tracked all this … SparkPeople of course keeps track of the points for me so I just reviewed at the beginning of the next day.  As for the others, I have little codes I have been added to my calendar.  My little notations on each day say things like P, E, W, V.   Translation: No Pepsi, exercised, water, and vitamins.  Simple as each one then equals a quarter.

Wish me luck on a good jump-start to a healthy new year!