Starting a new Challenge - Snow Day

So as you can tell by my lack of updates, I fell off the wagon quite convincingly.  Over the last few months I've regained a lot of the weight I lost.  I've still held off about half of the total weight lost on the first challenge, but the trend was getting away from me.

So what happened?  Simply put I got back into my old habits.  Even though for much of that time I was still running semi-regularly my eating habits went wildly off track.  5 Guys, Pizza Hut and Wendy's all show up a lot on my credit card statements, as well as half a dozen local restaurants.  Instead of buying and making sensible meals, I was going out to eat because it was "easier" and I was "tired."  As things started heading in that direction it only made things worse.  Even more, when I'd try and get back on a diet the sense of urgency was gone.  I'd done the whole weight loss thing, I didn't need to do it again.  I run half-marathons (even if I'm not in training), and I kickbox (even if I haven't been to class in three months).

So those are the negatives, and they pretty much account for why my weight has started spiking (particularly since the beginning of December).  So what are some of the positives?  Well, when I make food at home the changes to my diet have stuck pretty well.  I no longer make the old 2000 calories "pasta surprise" (the surprise is that it's always exactly the same).  I don't really get a bunch of the frozen nuggets, fish sticks or fries much anymore.  I tend to eat reasonably healthy in fact, as long as I'm making the food myself.  Unfortunately I stopped doing that.  While my eating habits at home have changed, at restaurants they're still the same huge calorie meals.

So we're starting a new challenge and we're going to try and go with some of what made it successful the first time.  First is coming up with a prize I'm going to want to earn, without it being something to buy regardless of the results.  So the prize for 200,000 calories is going to be a new computer.  I'm setting myself a $2000 budget for the new machine as well, so it's potentially going to be awesome.  The second step is to get back to tracking this stuff on a day-to-day basis rather than just winging it.  Hopefully that will help keep me on track.  The last step is to get back into training for a half-marathon.  I'm not doing a spring season of Team Challenge, but I'm going to pick some other races to train for instead.

So today was spent digging out from a blizzard.  As such the points were much higher than might be expected on a normal day.  Food was:  an egg and cheese sandwich (300 calories), a bag of microwave popcorn (400 calories according to the box) and then dinner was penne, sauce and garlic toast (1000 calories).  Exercise was three hours of shoveling snow (2000 calories according to most sights for someone of my current weight).

Daily Point Total:
Daily Food Total:  1700
Exercise: 2000
Points Earned: 3300
Total Points Earned:  3300
Points to go:  196700