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Last challenge, I found a climbing gym, rediscovered my love for climbing, and got into a great rhythm of climbing every other day. I'm keeping things much simpler this time and keeping the momentum rolling. 1. Battling pride Climbing has been great..... but, I'm still struggling with feeling self conscious about sucking or getting overly upset when I can't solve a route that is marked with a low enough grade that I ought to be able to solve it. Yesterday, Pride defeated me. Some new routes were set, and I could not for the life of me solve a vertical wall 5.8. (I can usually get the vertical 5.10s and the 5.8s kind of seem like ladders) I got really frustrated and worried that everyone would see how much I sucked, whined a lot, and was almost ready to walk out of the gym..... so.... To defeat Pride, I must: Attempt every single route marked 5.9 or lower. If I can't get it, keep trying and ask for help from one of the other climbers. One of my problems is that I tend to climb the things that play to my strengths, and I need to stop doing that. I will learn the most if I work on some of those weaknesses, even if they make me feel like I suck. 2. Battling Envy This one is simple. I've always been jealous of people who can do the splits. Rather than being envious, I'm going to take real steps to become more flexible. I started a program called Hyperbolic Stretching, and I'm going to stick with the stretching workouts there. The goal for this is 3 stretching sessions per week. 3. Battling Gluttony This one is another simple goal, stolen from I think @Elastigirl. I still need to lose weight. I'm still struggling a bit with mindless munching. If I want a snack, I will make myself wait at least 15 minutes before indulging. I'll also make sure to drink some water or tea in the meantime, since that can often stave off hunger. 4. Battling Sloth I need to be more productive and less lazy. For this goal, I'm going to focus on crochet and complete at least 3 small projects during the challenge. Some of the things in my queue are that I need to make a crochet cactus arrangement for my mom, a Shy Guy (from Mario games) for my son, and some vampires (based on the Voldemort from my HP crochet book) for Halloween. Let's do this!

All around us, it was as if the universe were holding its breath . . . waiting. All of life can be broken down into moments of transition or moments of revelation. This had the feeling of both. G'Quon wrote, "There is a greater darkness than the one we fight. It is the darkness of the soul that has lost its way. The war we fight is not against powers and principalities – it is against chaos and despair. Greater than the death of flesh is the death of hope, the death of dreams. Against this peril we can never surrender." The future is all around us, waiting in moments of transition, to be born in moments of revelation. No one knows the shape of that future, or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born in pain. Big Why I have respawned more times than I can count. And I think the main reason is that my big why wasn't strong enough, or big enough, or revisited often enough. I always start out strong but then something happens to disrupt the routine, or I get distracted, or lose focus, and it all comes crumbling down again. I was having a deep conversation with my partner and he said, "I wish you could just be happy with yourself the way you are, and I think you would be happier overall if you just accepted yourself as you are, instead of constantly trying and failing." I understand what he was trying to say, but I think there is a fundamental part of me that says, "You could be better." It says, "You weren't always like this, and staying this way is a failure." There's a logical part of it that says, "A healthier lifestyle would be good for your mental health because endorphins are a great remedy for depression," and "Most of your depression and insecurity comes from being unhappy with the state of your health and appearance, your inability to buy clothes, the loss of looks you once had under pounds of extra flesh, and being too unfit to do things you used to be able to do so easily." So, while I appreciate that he was saying what he said from a place of love and with the hope that I would love myself as much as he loves me, and be happy with myself in who I am now, I think that I will respectfully disagree. I deserve to be in the best condition I can be. I owe it to myself to look after my body. When I know what the right choices are, it makes no sense that I keep making the wrong choices. SMART Goals/Quest list This is a master list; I won't work on them all at once but I will work towards these big goals with the challenges. Nutrition: 1. Eating planned meals according to macros: 33P/29C/38F 2. Weighing and tracking food on MFP for at least 30 consecutive days 3. Phasing out carbonated drinks (including diet soda) in favour of water, tea and black coffee. 4. Cutting down on sugar and processed foods over time. 5. Reducing take-out meals to 3 times a week. Mental: 1. Getting control of my depression through meds and therapy. 2. Improving self-care such as brushing my teeth at least twice a day for a month. 3. Meditating every day for a month. 4. Overcoming social media addiction. 5. Updating progress here at least once a day. 6. Using my bullet journal to manage my time effectively. 7. Doing deep thinking about relationship stuff to improve our communication. 8. Tidying the apartment for 30 minutes every day. 9. Completing a konmari of the apartment before we move to Ecuador. 10. Quit smoking. 11. Developing real life, sincere friendships. Fitness 1. Exercising every day (30 day fitness challenge app). 2. Building a regular workout routine (on paper and in practice). 3. Developing a yoga practice routine on my rest days. 4. Spending at least 30 minutes outside each day (once I have left China and its air pollution). 5. Swimming at least once a week. 6. Do a 2 minute plank. 7. Do a pull up. 8. Run a 5k. 9. Climb a volcano. And if anything pops up to throw me off track, I will be prepared. After all,

Hellooo friends! You have stumbled upon my Intuitive Eating Journal. There will be a lot of feelings about food and my relationship with food. A lot of feelings. Hopefully most of it will be love towards food. I f**king love food. Why The Fox Is On The Run Tale as old as time: I have been a chronic dieter since my early teens, and I've tried pretty much every diet there is. I believed that being healthy meant being thin, so I hated myself for not being able to get thin (healthy) enough. I've also hated my body and myself for not having enough willpower to do what it takes to lose weight. My self-worth has been tied to how well I managed to eat. I'm sure we all know what self-hatred is, so I'm just going to go to the turning point. This spring, I was counting my calories and focusing on paleo-ish foods, when I started to feel fed up. I felt bloated and anxious, and eating was like an obstacle course I had to pass every day. Thinking about food took so much mental energy from me that I just wanted to let go for a moment. I had listened to a couple of podcasts about body positivity and intuitive eating, and I guess I had started to realize that I have all the information about what a healthy diet is, but there's something wrong with the implementation. I was in a constant fight with my body: "I'm not supposed to feel this way, I'm not supposed to eat like this", and so forth. So, the next morning, I didn't rush to eat my regular breakfast, but listened to my body: was I hungry yet? How much did I want to eat? What did I want to eat? After some time, the hunger signal kicked in, and I had my breakfast. And the hunger went away. I decided not to eat until I would be hungry again, and magically, the hunger signal kicked in a few hours later. I ate, listened to my body, and kept doing this. Listening to my body's signals was the turning point: I realized that every day, I had ignored my body and my feelings, and tried to make myself be good by following a diet made by someone else, someone who doesn't even know me. Basically, I had been telling myself every day to shut up and do as I'm told. Not cool! I realized that I had tied my self-worth to my food choices. Every day, if I had eaten "right", I could tell myself that it had been a good day, and if I had eaten "wrong", I would punish myself by eating less the next day. I can't say that I've had a full-blown eating disorder, but my eating has certainly been disordered. With the help of some body positivity resources and intuitive eating instructions, I started to work on my feelings of worthlessness, and now I feel like I have a better connection to myself and my body. I will never diet again, nor count calories. Where The Fox Is Running To Bacon and eggs. Obviously. My mission is to practice intuitive eating, and stay mindful about my food choices. After I stopped dieting and labeling foods as good or bad, I had a bit of a honeymoon: I ate everything I wanted, whenever I wanted, and didn't feel bad about it. After a couple of weeks, the foods I thought I had no control over (chocolate, ice cream), started to feel "meh". And then I started to get worried. If there are no rules, how do I construct my eating habits? I do want to keep my diet healthy: it is a fact that eating less processed foods makes me feel good, and eating a lot of processed foods and sugar makes me feel bad. And that's the key: There will be no rules, but guidelines. Following the guidelines helps me to pick the foods that make me feel good. My goal is to feel good and healthy, not to lose weight. It's a tough one, because I've always eaten to lose weight, but it's necessary if I truly want to reject the restrictive mindset and listen to my body instead. I can't control my body mass as much as I'd like to, anyway, but maybe I can make myself feel healthy and calm. And after a few weeks, I feel better. My stress levels and my self-hatred fueled anxiety have gone down. I am now learning to stay mindful about my food choices, and ask myself, how the food will make me feel - not if it's good or bad. It has been mentally very hard to process these feelings (as I forgave myself and let me just be as I am, I spent a few days crying because I was just so relieved), and it's still a process. I want to keep working on this, though, because I haven't felt this carefree and happy in a long, long time! This will probably be enough for now! I will gather resources and some ideas to the next post.

Posting this fashionably late, as always. This dragon will be the death of me! I am coming into this challenge with very little to almost no motivation at all. I thought about skipping it but then I would feel much worse in the long run. I have relapsed completely on my morning routine since the last challenge but I want to pick it up again. Quests 1. Practice mindful eating habits. No eating while standing, continue to not eat while gaming or watching tv. Focus on the food and nothing else for at least one meal a day. WIS + 3, WIL + 2 2. Track my food intake using FatSecret I have always been more successful when I keep track of what I have eaten. Also helps put into perspective just how much I am eating. WIS + 3 3. Yoga & Walking (One or the other, or maybe both, 5 times a week). Preferably mornings. STA +1, DEX +1 Ready to begin my Walk to MORDOR challenge! Life challenge Work on cosplay pieces at least 5 days a week. (no time limit, at least SOMETHING). Tracking and Accountability Progress Calendar Walkers PVP. Walk to Mordor progress in Signature. Mindful Eating FTW!

Hello! I am looking for a partner(s) that can join me with on my Epic Quest to slay an Archdemon (aka my bad eating habits) for this challenge and many more challenges to come! Age/gender doesn't matter, just as long as you are an active rebel in the forums and someone that needs a companion or accountability partner in return. I am struggling with food addiction, binge eating, overeating, depression, sciatic nerve pain due to a herniated disc, and lack of motivation. I also lack accountability and consequences (aside from that dinner binge that will pile up on my butt). Most details about me can be found on my profile page, but here some basics. I am a 36 y/o mom that works a full time job and I have been struggling with my weight since I was a small child. I have only been within a healthy weight range 1 or so years out of my entire life. I am about 80 lbs overweight, but I am considering going by body fat% or body measurements from now on. I have recently cut out sodas from my daily diet, as well as sweetener from my coffee. Right now the only exercise I am able to do is walk (due to the herniated disc) and I have just started the Walk to Mordor challenge. Aside from all that fitness stuff, I love video games, anime, drawing, watercolor, sewing, cosplay, and good ghost stories. Hoping to meet some awesome folks for the journey!

My 1st challenge and back story can be found here. Quest #1 - The Morning CALM, Stretch, & Strength Bedtime 9pm. Period. 8+ hours sleep. 1st week - be up by 6:30, practice one yoga pose/technique correctly for 5 minutes. 2nd week - 6:25, yoga 7 minutes, 1 to 2 poses, focus on technique. 3rd - 6:20, yoga 10 minutes 4th - 6:15, yoga 15 minutes 5th - 6:10 yoga 20 minutes 6th- 6:05, yoga 25 minutes 7th - 6:00 - GOAL! Working that early morning routine! Yoga 25-30 minutes. So far that is all I have specifically. I had it all typed up but left it on my computer at work! I woke up Sunday morning with a terrible pain in my back and hip and today I left work early because the pain was unbearable. No relief for 3 days and getting worse. I've tried stretches, heat/cold, ibuprofen, pillows, Epsom salt baths, hot showers..despite my best effort, it's the Dr office tomorrow (/groan). Sleeping with it has been terrible, which is not helping my first quest at all so far. But I will post the rest of my quests tomorrow, just wanted to get my initial post thru the door and say Hi. Now I have try to figure out how I will sleep tonight. UPDATED 1/9/2015: Accountability Log

Hello all, I first found NF last year and thought it was a pretty awesome site that generally melded well with my beliefs when it comes to nutrition, fitness and an overall healthy lifestyle. I kept up with the blog for a while and then I had some pretty significant surgery - abdominoplasty, where I had 1.5 lbs of skin removed and my abdominal muscles sewn back together, since they were almost 3cm apart. Basically my stomach went through a bit of a beating with my two pregnancies and I was told that without surgery I would always be carrying around that extra skin, which was making me feel extremely self conscious. So after surgery I was looking the best I had looked in a long time. Stupidly because I was unable to do any form of exercise for six weeks - I never really got back on the bandwagon and my nutrition started to suffer too. Then around March this year I started binge eating (which has been an ongoing problem for me for the last 4 years). So from September last year to August this year I went from 66.6kg (147 lbs) to 75.2kg (166 lbs). Well I’ve decided that enough is enough and for the last week and a bit I have cleaned up my act. I’ve started eating real food: chicken, turkey, tuna, lots of vegetables, berries, sweet potato, cottage cheese, milk and eggs. I’ve also been doing workouts again - planks, squats, dumbbell rows, push ups and around 20 minutes of cardio a day either dancing or plyo or a bit of boxing. I feel so much better already - I’ve lost 1.4kg (3 lb) and my body fat has gone down from 32.3 to 31.4%. Now I am back in it for the long run! So to keep myself motivated and so that I can have some nice friendly people to chat to - I have decided to join the NF community. I’m sure that surrounding myself with so many people taking a similar path to awesomeness I am much more likely to be able to hit my goals! So I very much look forward to "meeting" you all So where to from here? I’m hoping to continue to clean up my diet - maybe even head down the paleo path. And I want to continue to build my strength and endurance. My biggest goal however is to keep my mind healthy so that I can punch binge eating in the face! Stats wise I would love to drop down my body fat to a much healthier level - but I’m not sure what percentage to aim for? Oh and I want to be a ranger when I am out of the newbie stage, so I’ll be an Adventurer for the next challenge and then I am hoping to move on to become a ranger - strength, endurance, paleo and overall awesomeness - sounds like my cup of tea! And yes I am nerd too , let me see, I collect The Walking Dead and X-Men comics, I love awesome shows (Star Trek, Stargate, Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Misfits, etc), I collect PEZ dispensers and designer vinyl toys, I am a Nintendo fan, and more, but you get the drift. Now I am going to have a good long read of the NF blog to find out where I should go from here…