February Challenge - Day 28: Final thoughts of February's Challenge

Well, 28 days later and this month's challenge is going to get mixed reviews. While I was able to stay away from fast food, there were a few times I strayed including one day where I heffed down haagen daas. This experiment has taught me a couple of things:

1) I can't put dietary restrictions on myself because I love food too much. I can never be a vegetarian, or cut out carbs or say no to cheese. Food is my weakness, and there's nothing I can do to change it.

2) Balance is key. I've been able to plan a lot of my meals for work (both lunch and dinner) and it really helped me stay away from eating poorly this month. By cooking my meals in advance, I was able to plan and portion control the meals very well.

Unlike the drinking challenge, the food challenge was not so black and white. By withholding temptations, you're just setting yourself up for failure. So the lesson learned here? Never do a food challenge again.

January Challenge - Day 28: And it's over as quickly as it began.

Dear Nay-sayers,

I win. Suck it.

Love, Terence.

Hahaha...just kidding (not really). There were points where I doubted that I could last 28 days. While this was a nice challenge to start off the year with, I can't imagine it going on much longer. I am pretty grateful I don't belong to a religion that forbids indulging in alcohol or god forbid, I was allergic to alcohol in any way.

What did I learn from the last 28 days? First, I have the discipline to say no, even when everyone around me is drinking. Proof of that was at the Yahoo! party. Second, it's not so bad to have a drink once in a while, just don't have as many as I would normally have. From now on, I'll try to cut down to only two glasses of whatever drink I'm drinking when I go out. And finally, I probably won't be doing something like going without drinking for quite some time, I love me a glass o' wine.

Tomorrow I will start blogging about how I will face my healthy eating February challenge. I have already started with pre-cooking my meals for the next three days as I know it's going to be a challenge to find the time to cook during the week.

How will I keep to a 2,000 calorie a day diet? Stay tuned to find out.