Challenges

I don't think that I have mentioned here the challenges that Tony and I set for ourselves while we were on vacation. We vacationed at the beach the last week of June. It was a very nice and relaxing vacation. Our next scheduled vacation is to Walt Disney World. We will leave on 8/31/08 and return on 9/6/08. That is a full week at the most Magical Place on Earth AND I will get to have my 30th birthday there no less!!

Anyway, we decided to set up a few challenges for ourselves between vacations. They are as follows:

1. We will only eat out for dinner once every other week. - this is quite a challenge for be because, even though I know it is bad for me, I Really Love eating out and look forward to it.

2. I will eat out for lunch a maximum of once a week, less often if possible.

3. We will increase our exercise to 3 to 4 times a week. I had been doing a lot better, but over the last month really have done NO exercise. Tony cracked his tail bone back in November and really hasn't done any exercise since.

4. We will each try to lose ten pounds before Disney. We decided that this should be based on our pre-beach weight since we were Very bad on vacation. That means that I had about 4 extra pounds to work off. Tony claims that he was basically the same before and after....I smell something fishy though.

5. We will not buy anything that is not a necessity. That means basically we can buy groceries and not much else. We have modified that just a tad. We have a few gift cards left over from Christmas time. We decided that if we REALLY just feel the need to shop or eat out (we have a Cracker Barrel card) then we can spend the gift cards.

Anyway, we are going to try to stick with all of these things until we go to Disney. We started out with like 63 days for the challenge. I think we are down to 55 days now.

I have lost a couple of pounds so far. We haven't really gotten moving on the exercise yet though. We ate out for dinner last Thursday and so aren't supposed to eat out again until week after next. I didn't actually eat out lunch last week, but did go out w/ a coworker for ice cream. So I counted that as my "lunch". So far so good on the not spending thing.

Today, though we had a little bump in the road. We usually have lunch with my parents, my sisters and my grandparents on Sundays. Well this Sunday my parents weren't going to be there, but we were still going. Then Tony and I overslept. Plus one of his friends called late last night and said he needed a place to crash for the night. So we had to consider him for lunch also. SO... we ended up going out for lunch. This was mostly my idea which I feel really bad about (but I also was kinda happy about) but we did not have anything good to offer for lunch. So, we decided that it was just a slip up and we will continue to stay on track from here on out.

We had been in a REALLY bad eating out pattern that we Have to get out of. It is not good for our health nor our wallets. I think that even though we went out today, we are still WAY better off than if we had not been on this challenge. There have been weeks in the past when we would eat out on Thursday and say that we would not eat out on the weekend. Then the weekend would come and we would eat out on Friday. Then on some of our worst weekends we would eat out again on Saturday! We must break the habit. Tony would say I should rephrase that to "I must break that habit". He does not struggle with this nearly as much as I do.

I will keep you posted on how we do! I figure if we do well on 1, 2, and 5 then we will have saved a good bit of money by vacation time :o) That will be a nice bonus.