Well, It’s been about 18 months since I reached my goal weight of 135 lb while with Jenny Craig. And in that time I’ve allowed my weight to creep back up by about 10 lbs, only half-heartedly trying to get it back down and blaming my lack of progress or even maintenance on being at school and a lack of opportunity for good exercise.

Well, no more.  My good friend Penny Parris has given me the incentive to get back those ten pounds, and possibly a few more (I secretly would really like to be down at 130 lb) by announcing her “Pounds off Penny for Pennies (or Twonies)” project (that links to her blog. There’s also a Facebook Event page).

Her plan is to use the incentive of getting pledges from friends and family per pound she looses over a three month period to be donated to the Heart and Stroke Foundation of BC. Many of her friends are supporting her and several of us have also “jumped on her bandwagon”, adding an additional pledge per pound that we are also able to lose over the same period of time.

To give me some more accountability, I’m also going to post details of my progress on my blog here, starting today. So, I started a week ago, weighing in on Sat. May 23 at 145 lb. After a week of concerted effort I’m already down to 142 lbs. today.  What a great start!

And as a “public service announcement” for anyone else who is interested in living a more healthy lifestyle, I highly recommend the Windows application Diet Power 4.4.

My mum discovered this application about five or six years ago (it was on V3 at the time) and my parents and I have all used it with great success several times since then (it was a particularly useful addition to the basic Jenny Craig program). The application allows you to enter your weight, your daily food intake and your daily exercise and from that information it tracks the your nutrition levels, total calories and progress against a goal weight (which can be lower, higher or even the same for maintenance). It calculates how many calories you should be eating each day, initially based on standard averages for a person of your gender, age, height and weight but recalculates the amount based on your actual metabolism as determined by the exercise, food and weight details you’ve entered. 

It’s an awesome program, and totally worth the US$39.99.

:-j(enni)