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Not sure if The Woot Room is the best/right/most suitable place to put this. But in a way it felt right, at least more so than just making a post in my current challenge thread. Anyway, here's a look back at my first year of challenges here on Nerd Fitness. On May 30th, 2013 I decided to start off with a challenge. It definitely got modified a little bit during the time, but that was the beginnings. I had been a reader of the Nerd Fitness blog for many years, and had previously had some false starts that were inspired by the writings of Steve Kamb. I was definitely aware of the Challenges for a long while, but hesitated going into the community, I used a variety of different excuses some of which were based in my own introverted nature. I had tried various public displays of attempts to get healthy in the past, and they had all failed. I had even attempted to create an event similar to the NF challenges on another online community I was a part of. But having to run the whole thing and focus on my own goals caused me to burn out quickly. I don't recall the mindset I was in but I came across yet another post about the challenges from Steve, and that very day my challenge thread was created. That step created the most self-aware year I've had in my entire life. For the first challenge, I went all in, dragged in my prewife , as well as one of my good friends (who was recently featured on the NF Blog). I wanted to try to get as many people involved as possible, but I still planned to keep to myself. However one of the early mini-challenges was to reach out to other people, become social, join or create an accountabillibuddy team... since the ones that appealed to me appeared to be full, I decided to take the leap and created Rogue Squadron, which true to it's namesake is still going strong even with major shifts in the membership (although there's still a holdover or two from the original group). The first challenge included a lot of figuring out how to handle it, I tested out trying to add a story to the challenge, and that ended up falling flat for me, than I looked into possibly creating a thematic trend that I'd try to keep up with for several challenges, but ended up adding nothing to the challenge for me. Looking at the ending of this first challenge it looks like things were going awesome. I aced all my challenges, I lost four pounds, many inches in some areas, my Body Fat % went down by 4%. It was brilliant, at least on the surface. In truth it wasn't nearly as great, I had been fluctuating up and down the whole challenge, not making amazing progress. I'm sure many things were inconsistent. Furthermore I wasn't honest, I cheated, I adjusted things to claim I fully performed the challenge when the truth was I hadn't. I didn't earn the scores I gave myself, didn't complete everything to the full level that I said I did. I failed to truly learn much from the first challenge. I jumped in pretty heavy, patted myself on my back at the progress I made, cheated myself out of valuable learning experiences and the truth about where I was at. Took the psychological boost of all those high scores and moved on. Between my first and second challenge the challenges had a bit of a change. The Level 1 group was introduced and the way the individual challenges were created were changed, thusly I had to look a bit harder at my gameplan heading in for it. Challenge 2 proved to be my learning experience. I started off trying to keep up with everything, but eventually I started to slide a little bit, at first I thought by altering my own statements of my challenge I could make things work, by cheating myself out of the goals I had initially set. Eventually I got to a point where I couldn't lie to myself anymore, I had to admit that things weren't at the level I was pretending they were. While I did excellent with some areas (Like Cold Showers!) I did poorly with the others. There was some slight improvements during this challenge, but the most important aspect is I started learning about the truths about what I was capable of, but I was allowing myself to be impacted negatively by it, viewing it all as bad things instead of welcoming the failures as merely tools to learn by. I was debating if this should be my final challenge or not, but thankfully the debate was relatively short lived and seeing the support of the folks in the community helped me to come back for more. The start of Challenge 3 had me in an odd spot, I had backpedaled a bit in the measurements department from where I ended the previous challenge. But I was still here, I was trying to refocus, find that place where I could go. I returned to a few goals from the second challenge, toning some down, and trying to move forward. My friend and my prewife dropped out of the challenges and I no longer had their support on the forums, and the overall support I saw was lower than usual, perhaps I wasn't going out and being as supportive as I had been previously, but whatever the cause I was missing a bit. I ended up going up and down each week was a struggle to do some of the challenges, and some of them I just rushed in towards the end, but I managed to do decent enough scores, and for the most part earned them. I know that about halfway through the challenge I was about ready to give it up, but one of the mini-challenges for the Adventurers was to shift your weekly update around and look at it in a positive way only. Having done that it had altered my entire opinion on the previous week and helped bolster me through to the end of the challenge. Challenge 4 is when I finally started to step away from the thematic elements a bit and decided to focus on the challenges themselves more when setting it up. My between challenge period had hurt me yet again, it's a period that I'm still struggling with even now. But I came in with a positive outlook for the challenge. It was built upon the previous challenge and tried to continue forward. I actually had a wealth of support during the challenge...at least while I was still posting, but I found myself moving in the opposite direction. I became overwhelmed with everything I was doing. The challenge proved a mixxed bag and I had decent parts and parts I outright failed. I didn't want to come back...I felt I had started to fail myself, I had been sick, and I hadn't been posting. I was all set to skip the next challenge. I ended up perusing the forums for the new challenge and people were asking after me in the Rogue Squadron forums created by others inspired me to jump in and create Challenge 5. During this challenge I ended up stopping my measurements and tracking for a while, and continued on with the various things I was hoping for. I had decided to really focus this time, and didn't do a side quest. It wasn't the best results, but it ended up being a decent following. My diet was still proving difficult, and my exercise was proving problematic I still ended up with decent results. In the end I wasn't super happy with the results, but they were enough and I started to realize that the learning experience was the important part, building upon what had come before. With Challenge 6 I finally nailed down a specific main goal, brought back a side quest to focus on a major part of problems that were causing me depression (financial woes...whee!) I brought back my measurements and realized I had jumped back up nearby the starting weight...but saw much lower measurements, my assumption was that it was just errant scale numbers, especially when the end of the first week had measurements that were fairly close, but 5 lbs lighter. I'd end up staying at roughly the same numbers through the challenge, at least when I recorded. I tried doing daily updates for a while, but ended up dropping off, it's something that just doesn't fully work for me throughout the whole challenge. At the end I was still struggling with my diet and exercise, and I was trying to figure out ways to continue from there... This of course brings us to Challenge 7, the final challenge of the yearlong period. I had been taking the lessons learned from previous challenges and building upon them. I finally aced my diet, I just barely managed to ace my exercise...I aced almost everything, there was one B in there (for a secondary diet goal) that did throw me into a bit of a down bit, the end of the challenge planted me on a bit of a plateau, but overall it turned out to be the best challenge I had here. I was honest to myself, I did well and it was built upon the work from the previous six challenges, and it felt awesome. Of course I'm sticking around for now. my thread for Challenge 8 is already up, and it's completely built upon past challenges. I'm bringing back the cold shower from Challenge 2, finally moving forward with the main diet challenge, going back to the exercise routines from my earliest challenges and bringing back the no-snacks from Challenge 6. Overall I'm hoping that it'll be an even better challenge than #7! Now I spent a lot of time going up and down, but let's take a look at my numbers. START: (Challenge 1 Start) Height: 68" Weight: 226 lbs Waist: 47.25" Hips: 42.5" Chest: 45" Neck: 17" Thigh(Left): 22.5" Thigh(Right): 22.5" Bicep(Left): 14" Bicept(Right): 14" Body Fat %: 36% It's also worth noting that at the time I was wearing size 44 waist pants, but they were the ones with the elastic band, so who knows what size they went out to, and they were generally tightish. End of Year: (Challenge 7 End) Height: 68" Weight: 213 lbs Waist: 39" Hips: 40" Chest: 40" Neck: 15" Thigh(Left): 22" Thigh(Right): 22" Bicep(Left): 13" Bicep(Right): 13.24" Body Fat %: 27% I currently have one pair of pants that fit, because I went out and purchased a single pair because I was getting tired of the ones I had slipping, and they're a size 38 waist. Also since I'm focusing on weight loss, but also gaining some muscle strength I'm not to worried about the measurements for my thighs and biceps. Not all of the measurements are at their lowest, but there's definite progress over the year, and that's awesome. I'll probably take some pictures for my initial measurements for the new challenge, and if everyone is interested I can post up the starting ones from the first challenge and the new ones up here as well. So that's my first year here, a year of mostly plateauing, learning, and slow progress...but it helped me get focused, figure out some paths, and start getting into a better mindset, and for all that...it's definitely a win. UPDATE: Here's the promised pictures for y'all. Old on left, new on Right