November Challenge... Extended AKA "Winter Challenge"

November Challenge Recap: 

• Self-imposed shopping freeze.  This mostly has to do with clothing.  Desired shopping trip come Black Friday.  
• Starting weight on November 1st = X.  
• Need to Lose: 6% of X
• Deadline (in order to break shopping freeze): Black Friday morning, 3 weeks.
• Added little challenges: That is the morning immediately following Thanksgiving.  Pre-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving with some friends this weekend. (huge meals!)
• General approach: Better eating, Start to routine up working out again for regularity, Start sleeping like a human being.

At the end of the Challenge, being Thanksgiving/Black Friday, I was still at only 1% lost.  Which means I am home working and not shopping today (Black Friday).

I started to recognize how ambitious my 3-week 6% was - but the fact of the matter is I don't appreciate buying clothes at this size and feel anyways - so here is the extension of my November Challenge, renamed my "Winter Challenge."

I want to buy clothes.  But I need to drop some pounds, and stop feeling gross, and require a good motivator on top of just myself and my internal dialogue.  Especially motivating is that I seriously want to buy this wool pencil skirt from J Crew in at least four colors (and it's on sale! with extra sale! today! yaaarh).

So I am continuing with my self-imposed shopping freeze.  There's no deadline, so much as ASAP. As a punishment for this failure, I am upping the ante to 8%. 

This means I am on a self-imposed shopping freeze until I have lost 8% of X (starting weight from November 1st).

The November Challenge was at least some decent base building.  (I also just signed up for Spring Team in Training for a double header of half marathons, and am currently base building for training, just meaning that I'm laying the groundwork to start training for half marathons.  And I similarly look at the November Challenge as having laid the groundwork to really start dropping some weight/getting in shape).

Even if it was only 1% lost of X, I started to force myself to be more conscious of my eating habits (next step is to... eat less), and I finally began to work out again and added cardio workouts back into my life (necessary, next step more consistency and increased intensity).  I have also been working on fixing my sleeping habits, to keep myself healthy in other ways.  A lot of first steps/beginnings for this whole "you know how to drop weight and keep it off, so why don't you just do it..." - and here I am.

Weekly updates to come.