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Ready to Hack... On the surface, this won't look that much different than my last challenge. (Don't let appearances fool you.) This challenge, I will still be stretching... Swimming... Getting enough Zzzzzz... Eating my vegetables... Coding... Meditating... Keeping my journal... and taroting. However, some major family dysfunction that went down last challenge has caused me to look far more deeply into my current life situation. This challenge will be about hacking my depression through the above methods and setting up a better system to get me through the rough times. There are some life events that are also be factored into this challenge. We have a new addition to the family - an injured stray tuxedo cat who is a delight and quite the character - but is causing some disruptions to life as we have known it. (Pictures soon!) And, I am studying for an exam to certify in a particular data visualization software the first part of November. It is going to be a real stretch to get ready in time, but I have a plan... Next couple of challenges - Some of the changes I have chosen to make will take a couple of challenges to put into place. Between now and the end of the year, I will: Revamp my Epic Quest Move my challenges back to my more gamified, storified, and creative model of yore Move to a more visual model of challenge tracking. My budding skills as a data analyst/engineer have bumped into to my previous nerdy, rangery desire to create the perfect spreadsheet. The result is a goal to "Viz All the Things!" That should keep me busy. I will be continuing to use an adaptive change model over the course of this challenge. It was a bit bumpy last time, but I think I have worked out a better tracking model and have learned where things went off the rails. More musings on that later...

Welcome back to aisle4b's Life Marathon 2016! I’ve made it through the opening miles, now it’s time to stick it out and keep a steady pace; this is the tricky part where it’s easy to get cocky and take on too much too fast, so this challenge is all about keeping up my good habits while slowly adding a couple more. Goals for this challenge: Focus on improving my diet by eating at home more than out, and reducing the variability of my caloric intake We all know the sayings around how much more important diet is than exercise, and I'm just now admitting it and really starting to work on my diet - it's so much easier to run for an hour than to hold off on my cravings for the other 23! I’m starting to look at exercise more as helping my mental health and physical strength/endurance, while diet increases my overall health and weight loss. For this challenge I’ll being coming back to my Kitchen Karate account and doing meal prep once a week. Data: ate only items from home/the office (I also count anything I bought at least 24 hours before that has hung out at my house to avoid binge eating huge portions when I do go out) ate under calorie goal plus 1/2 exercise calories Build my utility belt Yes, I’m mixing my marathon metaphor with my personal character metaphor of Laura Croft. Up until this point, food has been my single coping/celebratory tool; if I’m feeling sad/angry/happy/tired/stressed out/have a headache/whatever, food was what I used. If you only have a hammer everything looks like a nail... Over the last couple of challenges I’ve found a couple of new, handy tools. But now, the data nerd in me wants to know: do these actually help? We don’t know until we track! So as part of my journaling, I’ll be including a breakdown of any tools I used that day, in response to what emotions/events, and whether I felt like it helped (0=no change, 1= some change but I’m not back to 100% and 2= worked like a charm!). so, by the end of this challenge I should have a pretty good map of what tools help with different situations; because yes, a knife is great for stabbing an enemy, but it’s also pretty damn helpful for a lot of cutting tasks. Data Track effect on mood in excel doc at least every other day (and in nightly journal on days I'm not near my computer) Complete SAVERS every morning (I can't find the Druid thread I found this on, but thank you fellow Rebel!!) Track my goals consistently and honestly Oh well, I ate a lot of salty food last night, I'll just...wait until tomorrow to weight myself... Yeah, I've been making a lot of excuses recently, and it shows! Data: Enter final calorie intake and FitBit TDEE into MFP/FitLegit/HappyScale daily And that's about it for this challenge! Like I said, slow and steady this time around!