Lady Amezan

I reached the end of the challenge and I don't feel great about it, but at least I kept records the whole time and I'm giving myself a pat on the back for that! My challenges: No-calorie beverages--I achieved this on 75% of days. Activity--I did much less than during last month's challenge. My goal was daily activity. I did something active on 25% of days. Not great. Mindful Eating--I kept track of how many meals I was mindful for. I was mindful for 58%. Meditation--In week 2, I decided to write mindful morning pages instead of meditation. I achieved my goal 71% of days. I feel good about the beverages and the meditation! Activity definitely was my weakness this month. Because I've been tracking things and thinking about my health I noticed that I get a ton of headaches. Often I get home from work with a headache and I pretty much go straight to bed instead of working towards my goals. So I've got a book about headache elimination to read, and maybe I should set a goal of exercising some but not every day, since there will definitely be days I want to go to bed as soon as I get home. Maybe I should just aim to exercise on the days I don't have headaches. I hope everyone else had a great challenge! I'm trying to get up the energy and motivation for another one.

I'm feeling better and made it to work today. My first two challenge days were decent--no physical activity because I was sick, but I did manage to meditate and avoid drinking a ton of high calorie juices (which are so tempting when I'm sick!). Today I'm having a normal work day and that means doing some proper physical activity when I get home.

Hi, Grayson! Great to see a familiar face here. I still haven't managed to write my goals in your super-cool "I'm a .... " format, but you've inspired me to talk to myself that way sometimes. I hope you can keep going through the business trip. I get easily thrown off by trips and changes to routine. Hopefully the structure of the 4WC will help.

Totally inspiring! I'm also fighting a cold right now, and the temptation is to stay on the couch. But I think I should get going if I want to be a badass too!

Last month was my first NF 4-week challenge and now I'm looking for a guild. I figure I'm more a druid than anything else, though this particular quest is more about general health than any special druid magic. I've had a bad cold the last few days so I don't feel inspired or excited about the new 4WC, but today's Day 1, so I'm at least going to post my goals here. Hopefully I'll have more energy for writing as the month goes on! Quests: 1. Calories in: Substitute no-cal beverages for high-cal drinks at work AND at home. This means in addition to keeping up last month's habit (no sweet drinks at work) I'm going to stop drinking beer in the evenings at home after work. I can still have a drink when I'm out with friends, but I want to eliminate the occasional lone weeknight beer. 2. Calories out: Get some physical activity every day. This is one where I slacked a bit as last month went on. And today I totally want to skip this because I feel like crap. So I'm not sure what I'll do today. But I know I need some activity every day. 3. Mindful eating: Last month I made big improvements in mindful eating by cutting out screens (TV and phone) from meals. But this habit is really hard to keep up so I'm putting it here again, and extending it to general mindfulness while eating. 4. Life stuff: Meditate 10 minutes each morning. This summer I had a really strong meditation habit, but I slacked during September, and I need to get back into it. That's it for now. Too many aches and pains. I hope everyone else is feeling well! Have a good challenge!

Your gif mastery remains strong, Nol!

Congrats on a good quest, even if you didn't get an A on everything! Keeping up a regular habit of stretching is the first step to regular habits of all kinds. I totally know this feeling. Often I have no good reason for stopping (or at least I can't think of any good reason). I just slack off because, well, I did a good job last week so why does it matter this week? And I'll do that even when I know my good habits make me feel better. I haven't thought much about why this is. I usually chalk it up to the fact that I don't like routine. But if a routine feels good, why stop it? So there must be something deeper going on, and I should think about why that is. Maybe something for me to consider next quest. I'll be back for more next month and following your adventures! Thanks for all the encouragement and great gifs! And wherever you go in your travels, always remember the wisdom of Bob Ross:

Awesome job on all your quests! I was really inspired by your posts! I'll keep reading if you do the next challenge. I'm still thinking about my goals for the next one, but I think they will include some lifting heavy objects. (Specifically: myself. Bodyweight training FTW!) I hope you feel good and jazzed about all your healthy eating, better sleep and better posture!

Thanks so much for all your great encouragement this challenge! I'll be back for the next one. I still have to decide what my goals are. And this time I'll be using an accurate scale! (We'll call that a Victory for the forces of Truth, if nothing else.) Celebrating my first 4-week challenge!

Thanks for reminding me not to let the scale have a say! I'm excited about my new Clever Fox journal/planner. It has places to write goals each week and to keep track of daily habits, perfect for NF style leveling up. And it comes in a bunch of colors. A pic from Amazon:

Today I weighed myself on the new, hopefully more accurate scale. And I'm 10 pounds heavier than I thought I was. This is disappointing. On the other hand, according to the old, wildly inaccurate scale, I've lost 9 pounds during this challenge. So..... I have this strange feeling of being exactly where I started. I also take measurements once a month, and everything is exactly the same or a little bit smaller. So depending on how you think about it, I've suddenly gained ten pounds, recently lost nine pounds and also stayed exactly the same. I guess that's why I'm trying to focus on habit-building, not numbers on a scale! Habits this challenge: 1. I was 100% at avoiding sugary drinks at work and substituting water instead. That felt great! 2. I did really well avoiding screens while eating during the first three weeks. This past week, I kept finding excuses to keep the TV on during dinner. (But breakfast and lunch still screen-free.) 3. I did get physically activity--either a yoga program or walking--every day except two days when I was sick and coughing a lot. The yoga especially has helped reduce my aches and pains, making walking more pleasant. 4. I washed the dishes every day all month except twice, which is like an all time record for me. That feels amazing. I ordered some loot last week and it arrived by international mail yesterday--a cool journal to write goals and track habits in. The challenge this week: continue my good habits. I'm really good at abandoning good habits!

Sorry to hear that. I'm American, so I have a little experience with politics-related stress. I've eaten way too much stress chocolate in the past two years. I hope you can stay on target!

Being sick this week definitely made things harder. There was a day when I didn't do the dishes, and a couple days when I didn't do any physical activity. Also, this week I've been eating dinner with the TV on--although I'm still doing mindful eating for breakfast and lunch. My greatest victory has been that I haven't had a single sugary coffee drink all month. There have been lots of days at work when I was really tempted to make a high-calorie hot beverage during the mid-afternoon slump. And instead I've been drinking water and keeping all that sugar out of my body. Yay for that! One small but discouraging thing: I discovered this week that my bathroom scale is wildly inaccurate. I thought I'd lost a couple pounds this month, but now I realize this scale is wrong by five pounds depending on how I stand on it. So my weight results from this month aren't really useful. I picked up a new digital scale yesterday, and hopefully this one will be more reliable. It's disappointing to not have actual numbers for the last month! Better luck next month.

Awesome gif! Sums up my thinking about so many things. I feel you!

I hear you! Kudos to you for giving up on the calorie counting. It sounds exhausting, miserable and unsustainable. (One of my coworkers currently eats rice cakes for lunch while I have my veggie and tempeh stew, and I feel so sorry for her! Plus there can't be many nutrients in those things.) I think I said something wrong up above, because I got muscle growth and strength increase confused. I should have said people can gain _strength_ while losing fat. I'm easily confused by this stuff. The only thing I really know for sure is that the internet is full of bad advice. It's hard to know which advice to take, except by experimenting on your own body and finding out what works for you. We're all different. My experience a few years ago: over 12 months, I went from 30% body fat to 22% body fat through HIIT, intense weight training (bodyweight and TRX) and healthy eating. I monitored body composition pretty carefully. (But no calorie counting.) I didn't gain any muscle. But, here's the important thing: I also didn't LOSE any muscle. While I lost many, many pounds of fat. (End result: way less squishy.) And I DID gain a lot of strength. And since I was strong and the squishy fat was missing, I felt pretty damn good. (Until I came to South Korea and started drinking all the beer.) So yeah, I guess if you want to gain muscle (as opposed to strength) at the same time as losing fat, that's super tricky. But there's an easier alternative: if you lose the squishy fat on top of the muscles, while keeping the muscles nourished, strong and well-fed, it can feel really awesome. If you're deadlifting, your muscles are definitely there and getting stronger! (Even if they aren't getting bigger in a poundage sense. Poundage isn't everything. This is why strong women can lift as much as a man but still be small and petite.)