There is a reason healthy sounds like it should start with hell...

There are two things that I hate immensely: going without diet coke, and vegetables.  (And school. But thats another story)  Thanks to healthy challenge, or as I like to call it, hell-thy challenge, I am going to have to stop loathing both of those things.  Why is this necessary?  Well here's a little illustration of what had in our basement. 

Apparently, we drink A LOT of soda.

So, Healthy Challenge is 12 weeks long (Ryan and I are catering this one to end at the finish line of our half marathon at the end of March) but basically there are several things that you must do each day, and you get a point for each requirement.  The seven possible points are made up of:

1) Eating 5 fruit or vegetable servings a day. 
2) Getting atleast 7 hours of sleep a night.
3) Drinking 64 oz of water a day
4) No carbonation
5) Getting atleast 30 minutes of exercise a day
6) No unhealthy food (ie chips, french fries etc)
7) No sweets (this one KILLS me)

You get 3 "flex points" a week, where you can have a sweet, drink a soda etc.  These are useful if you don't have time to exercise or don't feel like making yourself swallow disgusting vegetables for a day. 

My parents started this challenge last year, and everyone put in $20 bucks to start.  There were about 20 people competing, so the total money contributed ended up being about $400.  Everyone emailed my mom their points, and the person with the most points at the end of the challenge got the prize of the $400.  My roommates and I all participated last time, which definitely upped the competion (I remember one time accidentally forgetting that the chocolate covered strawberries at Zupas were considered sweets, and taking a bite, while my roomate Courtney watched and after I finished, she said triumphantly, "HAH!! Sweet point!!"  Thanks Courtney....) My roomates and I ended up winning last time and splitting the prize money three ways. 

This time, our motivation is if Ryan and I both keep a perfect score, we will either go on a fun weekend trip somewhere, or he can buy a gun and I can go on a shopping spree :) However, if anyone is interested in doing the healthy challenge with us, let me know and we can get one start one like my parents did!

We've been doing this for about a week now, and I can already tell a difference in how I feel.  Although atleast 30% of the time I am miserable because I want peanut butter m & m's or a diet coke soooo bad, the other 70% of the time, I defintiely have more energy and feel WAY better when I run.  Hopefully it all keeps going good and we don't die in the half marathon!

These are the things that have saved me so far on this challenge and have helped taked the hell out of healthy:
-Edamame-  A suprisingly undisgusting vegetable!  They sell 12 individually microwavable packages of this stuff for like $7 at Costco
-"Caffeine water"- aka flavored packets of deliciousness that may or not have laces of caffeine in them.... I'm calling these my diet coke nicorette. 
-Stacy's cinnamon Pita Chips-  A healthy, semi sweet snack that helps dull my sweet cravings