Artemis

I really enjoy the workouts, though I haven't been great about doing them consistently. I'm cutting back a little on workouts this challenge to focus more on food and lay a better groundwork for overall health. If everything goes well, I'll raise the frequency for the next challenge. Yearly Whole 30? Nice. I think whole 30ish is the way to go in the long term. I have a pretty good idea of what I can and can't have based on my reactions after reintroducing food last time. I considered doing a perfect whole 30 this month, but I expect I'll get pretty good results even doing a 99% version and hopefully it will result in more permanent changes. Mostly calling it a Whole 30ish so people understand the dietary guidelines I'm following; I know that breaking any of the rules is against the official Whole 30 guidelines. Update: Today was a pretty slow day; I stuck to my dietary guidelines and did a bit of room cleaning.

I noticed the onset of a mild headache today and I'm hoping it passes quickly, or at least doesn't get much worse. My food choices were perfect, and I believe things are going well so far. Listened to a few more podcasts at work and squeezed in a 30 minute walk in the evening.

Daily update: The food changes are going well so far (yes, I know it's only been 24 hrs) and I Meal prepped 4 days of lunches and 6 days of breakfasts last night. Also managed to do a whole week's worth of laundry so I have a no-stress professional wardrobe for the week. I'm hoping to make a trip out to Sprouts tomorrow since I have learned that they have whole 30 approved bacon and I think I need to add 1 2 3 tons of bacon to my emergency food stash in the freezer. Maintain the Starship - We're allowed to use headphones at work and I opted to listen to a few Bulletproof and MFCEO podcast episodes instead of music today.

I'm going to keep the theme of my last two challenges (#starwars). I started my first job out of college a few weeks ago and am still adapting to the schedule and figuring out how to orient my life around this change. I definitely tried to do too much last challenge, so I've made some changes that will hopefully improve my ability to succeed this time around. The main goal with these changes is to enable me to achieve more by doing less. The largest focus this challenge is therefore going to be upon food since I cook regularly anyways and changing my diet doesn't take much added time. 1. Prepare for Battle - Foundational Fitness For the duration of this challenge, I will be working my way through the Darebee Age of Pandora fitness quest. Challenge Goal: Complete at least four Age of Pandora workouts weekly 2. Eat Like a Warrior - Whole 30 ish I completed a Whole 30 over a year ago and had a fantastic experience. I'm aiming to make a Whole 30/Paleo food lifestyle a more permanent fixture in my life, so I'll be following a modified Whole 30 this challenge to get me kickstarted. Mods: I can consume dark chocolate in small amounts. I can drink alcohol if I'm out socialising with friends (might happen 1-2 times this challenge). Challenge Goals - Successfully adhere to the new food standards. 3. TBA 4. Maintain the Starship - Life Goal Challenge Mini-Goals: Do something daily to improve my life. This can be pretty much anything as long as it is something that is productive. Examples: 5 minutes cleaning, listening to an educational podcast Ultimate Goal - Fit in the Armor Challenge Goal - Lose 8 Pounds Bonus: Lose 10 Pounds - Award: Roll of 3d printer filament

Things are still moving along slowly. I've obviously been terrible about updating, and I apologize, but progress has been decent overall this challenge. I'm slowly working my way through Age of Pandora and have done a decent job implementing dietary changes (my biggest success so far). My progress has been far from perfect, however it has been farily consistent in both successes and failures and this has given me some ideas for how to improve the structure for the next challenge. Time was my biggest enemy this challenge and has made accomplishig my goals difficult. I realized that I'm not as settled into my new job as I had thought and that my evenings feel ridiculously short by the time I'm home. I'm exhausted by the end of the day and spending time stretching, cleaning, etc. is really unappealing. So, my goal next challenge is going to be to achieve more by doing less. AKA - meal prep for each workweek; prep clothing; and figure out how to begin becoming proficient at this adulting thing. I'm also seriously considering doing a Whole 30 to clean up my diet and make the most of my meal preps. Dietary changes are probably the most time-efficient way I can lose weight and become healthier.

Daily update: I ate letovers for lunch today and made a baked veggie/sausage dish for dinner. Overall, a fairly healthy food day. I also made time to prep my lunches for the rest of the week! Fitness: Finished another Age of Pandora workout.

I missed yesterdays update because I was out 8am-12am between my work day and a get together with friends. Things took longer than expected and I didn't have any time at home to do a workout. My meal decisions were also far from perfect and I should have made more of an effort to make better choices. I ended up eating out for both lunch and dinner since both my work group and my friend group went out. I hadn't made a plan for how to handle this situation and didn't make the best choices. Battle plan for eating out is in development. Today was much better: cranked out an Age of Pandora workout, updated my Habitica stats, and moved forward with a couple of personal projects. Planning to start my meal prepping tomorrow in order to be ready for the work week.

Quick update: Finished the first Age of Pandora workout yesterday and am slightly sore today. Planning another workout for tomorrow. I recently loaded Habitica onto my phone and have been slowly updating my account and designing routines to improve my life (Habitica gamifies elements of day to day life and lets you accrue "points"). I'm giving it a try as the visibility of the app acts as a reminder everytime I open my phone. Other wins: Entered food intake into the fitocracy app Took healthy leftovers to work

This challenge will follow a similar outline to the last one, however I am making one key change. I am going to update this thread DAILY, even if I achieved nothing of note that day. I have discovered that I need this accountability, otherwise I am likely to disappear/get wrapped up in other projects. Mini update from the last challenge: I recieved my 3D printer in the mail and assembled the kit, succeeded in acquiring a job, helped install a new 25 ft long section of fence in our backyard (multi-weekend project), and went on vacation for a week. Life was busy and I fell behind on my fitness goals as a result. Things are settling down now and I need to get back to prioritizing my fitness. 1. Prepare for Battle - Foundational Fitness For the duration of this challenge, I will be working my way through the Darebee Age of Pandora fitness quest. Challenge Goal: Complete at least five Age of Pandora workouts weekly (reduced from last challenge in order to be more managable. Bonus points for extra workouts). Bonus: Sign up for the local gym and visit at least 1x to work out. 2. Fit into the Smugglers Compartment - Become more Flexible I am ridiculously inflexible and it's kind of sad. Stretching is one of my least favorite things to do, mostly because I am horrifically inflexible, therefore I must endeavour to do it more often. Flexibility is great for all kinds of things, including fitting into smuggling compartments and infiltrating enemy strongholds through air ducts. Challenge Goal: Stretch for 5 minutes daily 3. Eat Like a Warrior This time around I'm not going to be strictly Paleo, but I expect to be fairly close by the end of the challenge. I'm also aiming to track my food intake in a journal and possibly start experimenting with a food scale. Challenge Goals - 1. Track food intake in my food journal without fail. Hold myself accountable for my eating habits. 2. Cut caffeine by the end of Week 3. Diet soda is not healthy. It needs to go. 4. Maintain the Starship - Life Goal (broken into Mini Goals) Challenge Mini-Goals: Clean the Crew Quarters - Finish organizing my room and make sure it stays clean. Find Mercenary Work - Apply for a minimum of 40 jobs. Just graduated from University and it's time to find a job. Ultimate Goal - Fit in the Armor Same as last time. Lose 4 pounds throughout this challenge in order to "fit" in the armor. Challenge Goal - Lose 4 Pounds (Amount changed to reflect remaining challenge duration) Bonus: Lose 6 Pounds - Prize TBA Side Quests Engage in Skirmishes - Participate in the Assassin Mini-challenge Join a Squad - Follow some other challenges and chat with members of NF

I hope you can get back to it soon, but I totally understand. Sometimes there just isn't room. Ok. Quick recap of the last few weeks since I didn't post anything. Life was crazy as I was job hunting and engaging in other mayhem. I acquired a 3d printer (which is a complete time-suck, but it is so much fun) and spent too many afternoons fine-tuning the thing. I should probably have prioritized better. I also went on vacation with the family for a week and backslid on most of my dietary progress as a result. The big wins for this challenge was successfully cutting back on diet coke, making some positive meal choices, and acquiring a job (yay!). I am going to redo this challenge and strive to do better (also, I am going to post daily updates. It will happen). 1. Prepare for Battle - Foundational Fitness Failed hard at this one, mainly because I didn't set aside time and truly make it a priority. Rebooting next challenge. 2. Fit into the Smugglers Compartment - Become more Flexible Challenge Goal: Stretch for 5 minutes daily - Complete fail. I hate stretching, however it is something I really need to work on. Rebooting next challenge. 3. Eat Like a Warrior Challenge Goals - 1. Track food intake in my food journal without fail. Hold myself accountable for my eating habits. - I'm giving myself 50% on this goal since I was doing really well for a while, but kind of 2. Cut caffeine by the end of Week 3. Diet soda is not healthy. It needs to go. - 75%. I have succeeded in reducing/nearly eliminating my caffeine dependancy, however as I have been cutting back on sugar/carbs in other areas I have been using about 1 can of Diet Coke daily as a sort of stop-gap to minimize the headaches I'm getting from my dietary changes. I need to suceed in completely eliminating it from my diet entirely. 4. Maintain the Starship - Life Goal (broken into Mini Goals) - Sucess!! Challenge Mini-Goals: Clean the Crew Quarters - Organization completed. Find Mercenary Work - Succeeded in finding a job. Just started work Tuesday. Ultimate Goal - Fit in the Armor While I did not succeed in losing any weight this challenge, I did manage to stabilise my weight and I consider that a fairly solid win. Next step - sustained weight loss.

Welcome to the Rebellion! How are things going so far?

Welcome to the rebellion! As long as you keep that attitude (do it even when it's not easy), you'll make progress. Which bodyweight workout did you pick?

I've done the Whole 30 before, and probably will do so again in a couple of months. It's a great program and the craving for junk foods will fade soon. I also really like the dream board idea, I've been meaning to do one of those. Have you started building yours?

Progress report: Officially "started" tonight with all aspects of the challenge. Cranked out my first workout and did five minutes of stretching. Food tracking has been going well since I first posted and I'm slowly making improvements to my diet. It's a lot harder to lie to myself when all my bad decisions are staring me in the face. Breakfasts are probably the most successful part of the day since it's relatively easy to make that meal healthy. Lunch/dinner is a bit harder since I don't control all of the food in the house. I have managed to move to homemade/fridge food instead of takeout, so... progress. I'm hoping I'll slowly be able to transition to Paleoish over the next couple of weeks as we rotate new foods into the fridge and I can ask for different grocery items. Hi! I wish I could say I finished the armor, but it's still a work in progress. Senior year of college was far busier than I expected plus finances have been tight and I wasn't able to buy the last couple of things I need (fabrics, paints, etc). Basically, things were put on hold. I intend to finish the project up once I have a steady job and a little bit of spare cash. I'm aiming to finish by December (only something like a year and a half behind schedule...). Are you still practicing rapier? Finding a local HEMA group is on my list of things to try once I have a job lined up.

Thanks everyone! I'm excited to be back and I promise to to entertain you all with plenty of Star Wars. I've been getting a slow start to this challenge and intend to jump in fully this weekend. Food tracking is going well and I've even been going for a daily walk since I'm currently housesitting two large dogs.

Right. Here we go. My last complete challenge was roughly a year ago (oops) and quite a bit has happened since then. Unfortunately, I managed to undo all of my progress and have even gained some additional weight. It's dissapointing, but it is what it is. Time to start over and make permanent changes. For now, I'm going to set a 6 month goal (not 100% sure what it is yet) since it corresponds to the end of the year and should give me enough time to really see some level of transformation. The theme this time around is Star Wars in general though it will probably center around Mandalorians. 1. Prepare for Battle - Foundational Fitness For the duration of this challenge, I will be working my way through the Darebee Age of Pandora fitness quest. Challenge Goal: Complete Age of Pandora Bonus: Sign up for the local gym and visit at least 2x a week to work out. The summer heatwave is coming and a gym membership will help my fitness quest since it's air conditioned. 2. Fit into the Smugglers Compartment - Become more Flexible I am ridiculously inflexible and it's kind of sad. Flexibility is great for all kinds of things, including fitting into smuggling compartments and infiltrating enemy strongholds through air ducts. Challenge Goal: Stretch for 5 minutes daily 3. Eat Like a Warrior This time around I'm not going to be strictly Paleo, but I expect to be fairly close by the end of the challenge. I'm also aiming to track my food intake in a journal and possibly start experimenting with a food scale. Challenge Goals - 1. Track food intake in my food journal without fail. Hold myself accountable for my eating habits. 2. Cut caffeine by the end of Week 3. Diet soda is not healthy. It needs to go. 4. Maintain the Starship - Life Goal (broken into Mini Goals) Challenge Mini-Goals: Clean the Crew Quarters - Finish organizing my room and make sure it stays clean. Find Mercenary Work - Apply for a minimum of 40 jobs. Just graduated from University and it's time to find a job. Ultimate Goal - Fit in the Armor Same as last time. Lose 8 pounds throughout this challenge in order to "fit" in the armor. Challenge Goal - Lose 8 Pounds Bonus: Lose 10 Pounds - Prize TBA Side Quests Engage in Skirmishes - Participate in the Assassin Mini-challenge Join a Squad - Follow some other challenges and chat with members of NF

Thanks! I love vacation, but I inevitably come back much heavier than I left... Not much to say for the last few days. I did a ton of meal prep Saturday and then I woke up this morning with what I believe is the stomach flu. I probably need to move my newly made meals into the freezer before ether go bad as I'm not able to eat much right now. Side note: yay for the challenge starting!

Nothing too exciting to report today, except that I ordered my groceries for the week. I took a look at Staci's meal prep articles and a few other similar things and decided to do something similar this week. Here's to keeping it simple! I still have various unhealthy foods in the fridge and I'll probably still eat those at some point (since they're already paid for), however I am going to do my best to avoid buying those types of food in the future. I'll post more about my meal prep tomorrow.

I am recycling this challenge setup from the beginning of the year since I have many of the same goals and, well, I love the theme. The theme this time around is Galavant and there will probably be some gallivanting (and possibly mayhem). Also, for those of you who are interested, Galavant is now on Netflix (at least in the US). Consider this to be an official SPOILER WARNING as I will probably include GIF's and things in this challenge. I made quite a bit of fitness progress late last year, early this year, however I've since managed to undo all of that progress. Back in late April, team projects/finals pressure started building up and I basically reverted to my old eating habits and completely sedentary lifestyle. Turns out, I didn't really have a plan in place to keep up my new habits when life got busy and chaotic. I also disappeared off the boards around the same time and, well, never came back. The short version of events is that I was lazy all summer long and have packed all of the weight I lost back on (also, long-vacations really don't help with weight loss). Now, I'm back and more determined than ever to really make it work this time. Short version = So, I'm like this: 1. Foundational Fitness Challenge Goals: Darebee Workout a minimum of 3x a week (any workout, as long as it looks fun). 30 minutes of walking/biking at least 2x a week 2. Food; Eat it Challenge Goal - Track food intake in my food journal without fail. Hold myself accountable for my eating habits. - 26 days possible. 3. Limit the (caffeine) Drinking Challenge Goal: - Cut caffeine by the end of Week 3. I was making progress with this and then... yeah. I'm back to regular doses of caffeinated soda. I should probably also look into setting up a more consistent sleeping schedule, since I tend to consume more soda (my primary caffeine source) when I'm exhausted. 4. Put the Armor on Properly - Life Goal (broken into Mini-Goals) Challenge Goals: Prepare the Armoury - Continue work on my Mandalorian Armor. I'm nearly finished with this project (It's been a long journey) and I'd love to wrap it up this challenge depending on how much schoolwork I have. Goal - finish the armor. Find Work - It's Senior year! And, I really need a job. Apply, apply, apply. Goal - Assemble a list of cities/companies where I'd like to work and get all of the background work done (updated resume, letters of recommendation, etc). Ultimate Goal - Weight Loss Current Weight: N/A This challenge is still a WIP. I'm hoping to update it tonight with more details/things, but this at least gets me started

Team Avengers! I'm so happy! It feels great to be getting somewhere, even though progress has been slow. The last few days were crazy busy, thus my relative silence on the forums. I went to the local renn faire with some friend on Saturday and we had a great time walking around and checking out the sites. Sunday I drove out to the local armor party. This is basically a get together for the local mandalorian cosplayers; there's a potluck and we spend all day building armor. It was great fun and I'm looking forward to the next one. On Monday I hosted a get together at my place for my local friends and we brought each other up to speed on our months at school. It has been a crazy last few days, and I have eaten far too much junk food. I really need to buckle down and control my diet. Exercising has started to become a fairly regular routine, but it's not going to make much of a difference if I keep eating cake. Other good news, my family just gave me 21st b-day presents (we agreed to wait until I was home from school in order to save on shipping / have more fun). I have a new laptop! Apparently this was the plan all along, even before I destroyed my current computer. Anyways, since I should have an internet connection besides my phone/borrowed computer, I should be able to update more regularly

That's super cool! I really wish I had a 3D printer. Thankfully, this computer is about 5 years old. This means no warranty, but it's probably reaching the end of it's lifespan. The thing has been through stuff that would have destroyed other computers, and it's rather surprising that it's made it this far. I'm a bit attatched to it, so I'm hoping I can have it fixed, though I may just but a new computer depending on how expensive the repairs will be. For now, I'm sharing the family computer. Thanks! It'll be a while.... Things are going slowly and I really packed on the weight over the last two months. I'm really focusing on working out, so hopefully I will be a bit thinner by the time I start fitting the torso armor. Fitness news: I've kind of l started tweaking the challenge to be more in line with the mini. Mostly this means that I've subbed out my Age of Pandora workouts for Darebee Katana workouts (elemental affinity). I've also been dragging the dogs on regular walks around the neighborhood. Hoping to update my total point progress later tonight. Still haven't been to the gym to register for the summer; that's top of my to-do list. My food habits are also rapidly improving as a result of having a well-stocked fridge. We ate out this morning, but otherwise the last few days have been great. Landed an unpaid virtual internship. Nothing too exciting, and I'm still on the hunt for something more permanent. They've given me two weeks to do a market research project. I estimate that it will take me less than 20 hours, so I'm aiming to be done by Wednesday. Hopefully, this will lead to a more permanent, paid job. I'm also working for a friends baking business and have been doing her accounts, cost analysis spreadsheets and things. This job pays, though I am going to have to actively avoid the yummy baked cookies. Apologies for the typos. I have clutzy phone fingers

Team Avengers! I love the rewards. What types of games do you prefer?

Here for the fencing (and Team Avengers)! Which style's your favorite so far? I've never seen this paraticular anime, but we just watched Spirited Away a few weeks ago for my fantasy class.

I didn't get nearly as much accomplished today as I would have liked. I dragged the dogs on a short walk but that was about it fitness wise since I ended up spending most of the day with family. We saw Civil War tonight (2nd time for me) and ate way too much unhealthy movie popcorn. Tomorrow should be a better day. I have a phone interview in the morning and will be spending the rest of the day helping a family friend with her startup. I'm also hoping to set up a gym membership for the summer someone this week.

Are you thinking of building the complete costume? There are ways to build a helmet from scratch using templates, paper, and fiberglass. I've done this and it's very time consuming. Depending on your size, you can also convert cheap plastic helmets by reinforcing the inside. This tends to be a good option for shorter women. Other than that, most people purchase their helmets from a prop maker, however this can be expensive. Check out: http://mandalorianmercs.org/forum/index.php?action=forum if you're thinking of building one. They have tons of really great information.