Blog
Feeling irresolute? There’s an app for that.
It’s that time of year again: we all get peer-pressured into making resolutions we know we won’t keep.
“I am,” we say, standing on the living room couch and waving a pretzel in the air like a scepter, “going to lose weight this year!” And our friends bench-press their champagne glasses and shout, “You go, girl! You’re awesome! We’re going to exercise more!”
And then we wake up the next morning, hungover and uncertain where our keys are. “Did I say I was going to do something this year?” we ask. “Yes,” someone mutters from across the room. “Drink less.”
My family has figured this out. They’ve resorted to bribery. And competition. Apparently, it works really well.
The family’s current round (they’ve done two or three before) is a three month challenge. This is the first round I’m joining, so I’m not entirely sure what the rules are (although it has been clarified that eating a bag of cheetos does not count as exercise), but from what I understand the general idea is that we all throw money into a pot and participate in the exercise challenge (exercise at least 30 min every day) and/or the weight challenge (being done as a percentage of body weight, which tells me someone who likes math made up the rules, because that sounds far more complicated than it needs to be). In addition, it appears that people are setting some other individual goals (lose a particular amount of weight, get back into certain activities, etc.). I’m not sure what their prize is. A gold star, maybe.
At the end of the three months, the pot gets split out between the winner(s) of the exercise and weight loss groups.
So here’s my challenge to anyone who is interested: let’s adapt this for the blog sphere.
You can join in on the exercise group, the weight loss group, or just join in to meet some other goal (for moral support, of course. Or immoral support, as you like).
* Check in every week. On Wednesday. No one wants to check in Monday morning.
* Report how much weight you lost. You do NOT have to say what your starting or ending weight is—just what you lose each week (half a pound, one pound, whatever it is).
* Report how much non-riding(!) exercise you did for the week. One point per half hour.
* Report how you’re doing with your goals.
If you don’t check in, we’ll come hound you. I mean, encourage you to get back on track.
I don’t really want to coordinate money to try to do a pot like my family is doing, but conceivably we could all pick a favorite equine charity and agree to donate $5 or $10 to the winner’s choice. We could all just donate directly and then not be sending money through a middle-man.
There’s a couple ways we can do this—I can set up something on this site pretty quickly to make it easy to report in and give us a sort of mini-forum where we can encourage each other, or we can set up an email chain. The family is doing it via email, but if people would like to keep their email addresses private, I’ll throw something together on this site that will allow everyone to do that.
Let me know if you’re interested. From what I’ve heard, this has worked really well for some of the family members doing it—the whole group effort/accountability/competition/bribery thing is apparently pretty motivating. This way, if we slack off for a week or two, we’ll have at least a virtual group pulling for us to get back on track.
I apparently need two virtual groups, because I fell off my whole weight loss plan hard at Thanksgiving and am dreading getting back into it.
« Jumping into the new year Call out the National Guard! »
Comments
It may just be us… if you don’t want to pick up a scale, we could just do a mutual accountability thing for meeting goals (exercise goals?).
Whoa, I guess I fell off the wagon. Exercise goals are good… just don’t laugh because mine are laughably low right now. I’m getting better, but the jello is still jelling… you know. Then later I can move on to marshmellow, and by then hopefully you’ll have figured out what’s next. Let me know, either via blog comment or (preferably) email.
Jane (The Literary Horse) says cookie dough comes after marshmallow.
I’ll send you an email—small goals are good. They’re more likely to get done.
On Jan 5, 2010, SprinklerBandit said:
Hm, interesting idea. I don’t actually own a scale, but I’d be willing to spend the money and get one if you get a couple of people on board. I’ll watch the blog for updates.