Week 1

Friday the 13th.  Our first weigh in for the Biggest Losers challenge was this morning.  Wow!  75 people emailing, texting and facebooking their weights to me!   It took me hours to collect all the data!  I have to admit, I'm pretty proud of this group.  This is the first time that I'm working primarily with complete strangers!  They send me their before pictures and every week they will send me a pretty picture of their toes on the digital scale. 
I know how hard it is to send pictures to someone else.  When I was going through my life/fitness transformation and was having to send Blythe pictures of me every week in a swimsuit, I would feel ill!  I absolutely HATED having to send those pictures.  You're raw, you're vulnerable, you're announcing to someone else THIS IS MY BODY.  Sure hundreds of people, thousands of people see you in real life, but to stand facing a camera, half naked, and asking someone to look at you and see everything you're not proud of...well, that's a little different. 

So by noon, I had all 75 weights and I tallied up the stats.  I was so proud of the group.  Although, we knew that this week would reflect higher % lost due to the initial water weight, it was still pretty impressive to see how many people lost weight and got off to a great start this first week of the challenge. 

My top losers this week lost over 4% of their body weight.  Not bad!  While I know its not realistic to keep that momentum in the weeks to follow, it certainly gives them a good start!  The test in the weeks following will be to maintain, continue to burn fat, monitor their diet and really push with their exercise.  Reading the comments and messages in the group, I don't think this is going to be a problem. 

It's amazing to me that all these strangers, brought together by the common goal : To Lose Weight are so supportive, encouraging, motivating and accountable to one another!  Great energy!

Through this challenge, I'll do my best to give weekly updates.  I would have loved to have been able to read back on the last challenge to see how we were doing week to week.  Last week, the first challenge was to do 200 jumping jacks each day.  This week's challenge is 100 push ups and 200 jumping jacks each day.  I've got my regular group of people that participate in the exercises, but I'm slowly starting to see more and more participation and that is really exciting! 

I have my eye on a few people that I just cannot help but want to see succeed soooo badly!  I know they need this.  I know that they want this and I can see that they just haven't had the support they've needed in the past. 

I'm so grateful for the opportunity to provide this safe haven of support for everyone and I hope that everyone is able to get something truly life changing from it!