Time for a contest?

Wondering if the rest of you are game for a contest of sorts? A friend who saw this blog said she did it with a group of women that made fitness and healthy eating a competition. They had each person put in $25 (I'm thinking more like $10 would be better), but after 12 weeks they tallied points and the winner(s) got the pot. (The winners also got a bit of weight off!)

Needless to say, if we each recruited a person or two, that would mean the winner would get something like $100 right in time for Christmas.

Points were given each day based on things like the following:

• Keeping a food log
• Exercising for 30 minutes (1 point per day -- 1 hour doesn't equal 2 points)
• One point for each serving of fruit/vegetables (up to 5 per day)
  
• Meeting a personal goal (me time, scripture study, not yelling, etc.)
• No snacking (1 snack the size of your palm = 0 points; more snacks = -1 point) (If you wonder if it's a snack, it's a snack!)
• Getting 6+ hours of sleep per night

That makes a possible total of 10 points each day. They also had a bonus point each Monday for those who posted to the blog and said how many points they'd earned over the past week (and hopefully how many pounds they'd lost!). My friend said the first few weeks she got hardly any points, but she endured and ended up losing a bit of weight.

As our kids start school and we're getting into new routines and schedules, it's a perfect time to make sure our fitness is a part of that schedule. I like that this point system isn't based on weight loss, but on overall fitness in general. If we were to start Sept. 1, we could go through Nov. 30 and find out the winner the first of December ...

Anyone game?