The plan...

Having started the diet/exercise thing a bunch of times, I know that it’s mostly a matter of will for me – both the will TO do (exercise) and NOT to do (eat badly).

Since I’m all about learning from my past experiences, I decided that the most important part of our regimen for me was that it address the “will” issue.
Other than that, there were three key requirements:

1. Clear guidelines on diet and exercise – I don’t do well with grey in these areas, since it’s too easy to rationalize bad behavior.
2. Since my boyfriend and I are doing this together, we needed a way to be supportive without being obnoxious.
3. It had to be simple to do and track

After a few months of discussion (we’ve been planning this since November), we decided to make a game/competition out of it. There are three rules:

1. Each of us needed to come up with our individual diet and exercise goals -- the “do’s” and “do not” list.
2. We created a point system to track our daily activities.
3. Scores would be tallied at the end of each week, month and quarter, and the winner would get a “prize”

The point system had to be simple, and we had to have an easy way to keep track of our scores in a central location – since each of us travels a lot.

Believe it or not, there was quite the discussion, deliberation and debate about the point system – should it be a 3 point, 5 point or 10 point scale, what constitutes a 1 and do we use the same or individual measures?

I was advocating for a smaller scale, since I have no idea how you decide whether something’s a 7 or an 8, and I wanted us to use the same criteria as much as possible to keep it simple.

After using our friends as mediators (thanks to all involved), we compromised on the following method:

• Every day, you can get a maximum of 10 points
  o 5 points for eating
  o 5 points for exercise

• You start off each day with a 5 for eating and a 0 (zero) for exercise

• Eating points are decremented when you “cheat”, based on the severity
  o For me, it’d be -1 for pasta, -2 for a sweet and -3 for alcohol.

• Exercise points are incremented based on the amount and type of exercise
o For us, a 5 is 90 minutes of intense exercise

We selected Google documents for tracking purposes, since we could create a spreadsheet that was sharable and accessible online. Then we weighed ourselves on this fancy schmancy scale that that calculates things like bone mass and body fat (by body part – yikes!) and we were ready to go.