help me with family weightloss challenge

sunflwr2

So I want to start a weightloss/healthier lifestyle challenge with my family and close friends.  I really don't know where to start.  Not everyone lives close, so it would be difficult to do regular weigh ins together.  And it's not totally about losing weight, it's really just something I want to do to help myself and my family move towards a healthier lifestlye.  Unfortuantely for most of us that does mean losing some weight though!  I thought we could start it in August and finish it at Thanksgiving because we all have thanksgiving dinner together at my house every year.  Where do I begin?  And how do I get everyone on board and into doing this?
Thanks for your advice!

beth2882

Our church has done several "Biggest Loser" and fitness competitions because our pastor's wife is a fitness nut (literally an extremist, in my opinion).  Anyway, she's done some that are strictly weight loss oriented - could your family email in pounds lost?  

She's also done some that were more general health competitions and each week had a theme where you had to make a change.  The idea was you kept the change and if the challenge lasted 10 weeks, you would have made 10 healthy changes to your life.  For example, you could do eat out one less time per week (I think we then donated that money to the church), replace one sugary beverage a day with water, exercise 3 times per week (walking, etc).  I think she might have had some sort of point value attached to these things and you reported what you did each week.  Then results were tallied at the end and the winner got some sort of prize.

KateLouise

In my experience you get the most buy in from people when they are a part of creating it. So I would email family/friends and basically say you'd like to make some health/lifestyle changes and thought it could be fun to do it together as a group if anyone's keen.

Then you could suggest a biggest loser type competition or a check in where people outline their own goals.

Ask people what they think they'd like to do and how it could work.

You'll probably need to be the driving first in terms of sending out weekly emails or however you make it work. Otherwise people will get all interested and then forget all about it.

If you think everyone in the group is facebook savvy, you could have a private facebook page. And depending on how much time people have and how educated they are you could share recipes, post weight updates, set weekly goals for drinking water/exercise/cooking at home. You could set monthly habits eg. August is all about drinking enough water. September is all about exercising regularly etc

Set Thanksgiving as a goal to touch base with each other, support and encourage each other, and use your hosting as a thank you for everyone's support to an ongoing goal. Rather than an end date to a project before you al go back to eating mcdonalds

You could post inspirational quotes, links to interesting/motivatiing articles.

i think an important thing will be in how you approach people. ie if you approach them in a, "I really want to make some changes to my lifestyle, and would appreciate/enjoy the support of a group if anyone wants to join me" will probably go over better than, "I think we all need to change our lifestyles because everyone's getting pretty fat. So how about we lose weight and I'll see you at thanksgiving where we can feel judged about how much we gained or lost."

(I'm not saying you would be so mean, just giving you an extreme example.) 

i think this is a great idea. I hope you get lots of buy in.