Is It Hawt In Here Or Is It Just Me?

I'm doing something I've never done before, never thought I would do, and still can't completely believe I'm doing.  No, I'm not moving back to Ohio, I'd move to Iowa before doing that.  The unthinkable deed that I'm referring to is joining a group fitness challenge, and I use the word "challenge" loosely.  More accurately, it's a group "motivation", drawing on the encouragement of others to keep working towards a goal, whatever that goal may be.

In this case, the goal is to generally become more healthy, in our eating habits and in our physical activity.  I already stated all of that in the opening blog post, so I won't repeat it here.  What I'm going to talk about in this post are the tools that we're (we being Missy and myself) are going to use to track our progress and stay on track.  Being a gadget geek, you can bet that I'll be using some sort of electronic doohickey to do this.

The first doohickey is my cell phone.  I've been a long-time user of an app called Runkeeper; I used it on my iPhone, and now I use it on android (don't get me started on which one is better).  The free version is a great app by itself, but I've paid for the premium version, which gets me all sorts of fancy reports, telling me how well I'm doing (or not).  If you look in the upper-right corner of this page, you'll see a "gadget" showing our latest Runkeeper activities.  Feel free to nag us if there's no recent activity there - get us off our butts and moving!

Up next on the gadget list is our Nintendo Wii.  Yes, we have the Wii Fit game, and yes, we've completely lost interest in it, like every other person who bought it.  Along with Wii Fit came the balance board, which doubles as an electronic scale.  We'll be using this to track our weight loss (or gain, if that's how it turns out).  I haven't figured out yet how, or if, I'll be posting that progress, but we will be tracking it.

Finally, this blog itself will be a valuable tool.  As I said in the opening post, if I publicly declare that I'm going to do something, I am much more driven to actually do it.  Face it, nobody wants to be known as "all talk, no walk" (pun intended).

There you have it.  This post is my first contribution to the group effort, a group consisting of some new friends who have been supportive of me in my writing efforts.  Now they're going to be supporting me/us in getting healthier.