More Comments --- Thanks!

Thanks for your comments to my post yesterday about the guy in the wheelchair! And thanks for being willing to start this 8-week challenge --- and willing to wait another few days to get started. I'm really glad to be doing it as a way to support each other, not compete for points or whatever.

If you Google "8-week challenge," you'll find a lot of people doing something like this. I see that two people who claim to have originated the idea have also copyrighted it, and are making money from it, which is fine with me. I know you can't copyright a title, so we're not breaking any law by calling our program by that name. And our program is our very own, modified from something we heard of earlier and still to be modified as we go along.

I thought I would gain some helpful insights from looking at those pages, but I didn't, which is also fine with me. We've all gone through enough fitness programs, and have read enough about diet and nutrition, that we can work it out ourselves.

For instance, for Week 2, we're supposed to keep writing down everything we eat and also cut out all sugary treats. I've done this before---in fact, I've gone without any sugar or honey or sweeteners of any kind for 3 years while I lived in Venezuela---and it has been the most helpful thing I've ever done to feel healthy and satisfied and to stop craving the sweets. But it doesn't work for everyone. And even if it worked for the last 7 weeks of the program, what if you then went back to sweets, and rebounded back in a way that made you feel more addicted to the sweets? --- Not so good! So some people I've done this with in the past have adjusted the program to allow themselves, say, one piece of chocolate with their dinner, or something like that.

Also, the Week 5 goal of drinking 8 glasses of water a day may not be good for everyone. In fact, I've been reading lately that the whole 8-glasses-of-water-a-day "rule" is completely unnecessary for most people and even bad for some. I'll probably keep doing it because I find it helpful. But it won't bother me if someone else does this a different way. 

We may also want to change our Week 6 goal. The latest reporting on nutrition suggests that multivitamins aren't really that good for us and certainly aren't necessary if we're eating the right way. So we can change that one. 

Or we could make the Week 5 and Week 6 goals completely different. What could we change to make these weeks' goals more helpful? I don't know. Ideas, anyone? The thing is to make it work for us.