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Hello all! Being a glutton for punishment, I am back for my 8th NF challenge, the one that will bring me full cycle to one year as a rebel. After a lot of internal debate, I am stepping back a bit to come at my goals from a different direction since my current approach has lead to 3 joint injuries and a series of dietary meltdowns. I remember reading a statement one time claiming that the mind cannot truly process a negative (meaning, we only understand it as the opposite of positive). For example, imagine "no hamburger". You can't do it. You could imagine this Or this but neither a cancelled hamburger nor an eaten hamburger is a "negative" hamburger. So, I want to explore my theory that I am struggling so much because I am focusing on negatives: losing weight, cutting sugar, etc. And negatives are, well, negative. The mind can't handle wanting less. The mind wants more. I would like to come at this from the other direction. What can I add that will improve my health and build my body? Let's try this: Eat Vegetables with Reckless Abandon Mark (of marksdailyapple.com) once described the primal diet in terms of "rampant consumption of vegetables". This term really appealed to me: rampant, uncontrolled, wild eating...of vegetables. Let's try it. Minimum of 5 servings of veggies per day. For the sake of the challenge, a serving = 1 cup leafy greens or 1/2 cup other vegetable, and "vegetable" shall include quasi-veggies and technical fruits, such as squashes, avocado, tomato, and sweet potato (but not white potato, legumes, or corn). It is my hope that rampant consumption of vegetables will naturally replace other, less healthy side dishes without focusing on deprivation. Bodybuilding (Baby steps) As much as I am tempted to jump right into a bodyweight workout to add strength (which I know was effective from last year's efforts), I feel I need to spend one challenge on building up my joints that I know are weak, so I stop having all these discouraging setbacks. So this goal is twofold: a) Gentle movement in the form of walking, dancing, yoga, extreme gardening, or whatever moving opportunity presents itself and appeals to me (3 hours/week) The idea is to do a variety of things to prevent repetetive motion injuries. 15 minutes of mobility exercises for hips, ankles, and wrists (following the plan laid out by my PT last year) every day And, that's all folks.