Mother and Daugher Starting Together

Well, I'm starting up again, only Dani and I are going to do this adventure together!! We are both going to track our calories, exercise, etc.

Point System - I'm adapting this from the HWHL blog that I participated in about a year and a half ago, when I lost 50 pounds:

10 points* - Eat your calorie range
3 points - Eat your fruits and vegetables for the day (it is not a point per f/v)
1 point** - Eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner
3 points - Drink 64 ounces of water
1 point - No Soda Pop!
1 point - Multi-vitamin
5 points*** - 30 minutes of exercise, only 6 days out of 7 can be counted
3 points - Food journal
3 points - stop eating at least 3 hours before bedtime (our summer goal for this is no food after 8pm)

This is a baseline of 30 points everyday.

*You get ONE free eating day during the challenge period. It's a calorie freebie day, one day to blow your calories. This means you can claim your 10 points for eating in your calorie range only once during the two week period, even if you exceed your calorie range.
**1 point - no more than 500 calories for dinner & dessert
***1 point - each addt'l 15 minutes of exercise

10 points - Random surprise challenges
30 Point Bonus - Set one meaningful goal for this two week challenge. If you reach your goal, you get to add on an additional 30 points. This can be anything that will be a challenge to you, but attainable. It could be, for example, to lose a certain amount of weight, wake up and exercise by a certain time everyday, or cleaning out the garage. Your choice, it's completely personal to you.

Challenge period - Typically this is two weeks. What used to be done on the HWHL blog is that whoever racked up the most points, got bragging rights on the blog for 2 weeks. If it's just me and Dani, that's not really going to cut it. Besides, I'm really into incentives, just a generic weight loss goal isn't a strong-enough motivator for tracking and controlling myself on a daily basis. What I'm going to do is a reward system - earn this many points, get this prize. That way, everyone can get a prize, period. None of that working-really-hard business, then getting beat out by the one training for a marathon. Please! This point system is hard enough as it is, thank you.

Reward System - Dani wants to work for clothes, so I'm going to award a dollar value for points earned. A Challenge Period is 2 weeks, so an excellent point record would be 14 days times 30 points a day is 420 points. Remember, there are ways to earn more than 30 points a day average, so you can make up for "bad" days (or those 2 days where you can't count your exercise.) So, here's the sliding scale:

420 points - $30 towards clothes
370 points - $25 towards clothes
320 points - $20 towards clothes
270 points - $15 towards clothes
220 points - $10 towards clothes
170 points - $5 towards clothes

Whatcha think? If you want to participate with us, let us know by commenting here on the blog. But you gotta do your own rewards. I can only be Dani's Sugar Momma, sorry!