Thursday, November 6, 2008

New day, new challenge and I'm ready to GO, GO, GO!!! This weeks challenge involved identify what our nutritional challenge is and brainstorming 5 ideas to cope with it. After much thought I came up with this ....

Nutritional Challenge

Challenge: Limit foods that offer no nutritional benefit

1) Allow no more than one "special" coffee per week, plan for it and enjoy. This also includes the use of sweetened creams which I tend to abuse.

2) Allow no more than two servings of an alcoholic beverage (as in - 1 single serving bottle, 1 normal size glass wine) per week and can only be consumed on one day. Must count points!

3) No purchasing unhealthy foods, or foods that are a challenge for me, from the bulk bins. (i.e. swedish berries, pretzels, chocolate covered almonds, dried pineapple …. )

4) Limit servings of sweet treats to maximum one per day. They will be there another day to enjoy.

5) Lots of baking planned for Christmas (gifts, etc.). Always chew gum while baking and package as soon as possible and put away. Refer to item #4 for limits to consumption.

I plan to put this to the test this weekend as I begin my jump on Christmas baking. As well, there's a chance we may be going out for a friends birthday this weekend and I know I'll be challenged with drinks and quite possibly fried foods and lots of other unhealthy choices. So I need to make choices that are good for me. I want to take this next step and continue down the path I've been going for this past year and I'm ready to committ to moving forward.

Another part of this week's challenge is to set 3 goals for the next 3 weeks. Mine are:

1) Log at least 350 minutes of exercise each week

2) Run the "loop" twice on my Sunday run with two or less stops

3) Make a recipe using salmon which I enjoy but keep putting off


I need to push myself a little bit harder. I've been close on the exercise, but not always consistent and I need to be consistent. For the 2nd item I really wanted to set my goal to run the loop twice without stopped, but then I thought about it. The groups I run with does intervals, usually 10-15 minutes run & 1 minute walk. I could go on without them, but to be honest I wouldn't want to be too far ahead of them on the trail all by myself. Though once I'm fit enough to run the whole thing I'm pretty sure I could convince a couple of the girls to run straight through with me.

And item #3 is just something I've been wanting to do for a while. I LOVE salmon but always put off cooking it because it's a bit more expensive than other meats and the kids won't eat it. But I've been drooling over a couple recipes for a few years and really need to give it a whirl. I could probably modify these recipes, but I think I might just save up the points and have them as is and enjoy them full flavour in a reasonable portion. I'll probably be deciding between these three recipes:










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