Happy Easter to my dear readers. I hope yours was as fun and peaceful as mine. I tried to spend the weekend as quietly as possible giving myself some time to reflect and plan ahead. Of course, part of my reflection included my journey to the body of my ‘dreams’ where I am of a certain desired weight, and have well toned muscles and a leaner frame. Hehehe! I am currently a long way off from that ‘dream body’, but still on my way, so no shaking. I will get there, EVENTUALLY!

A week ago, some of my work colleagues and I started a fitness challenge. There are 10 of us, 6 weeks, and we will determine the winner based on the highest body weight percentage lost. This means your loss will be a function of your starting weight (baseline) and there is no fixed number of kg to lose across the group. We each paid a certain amount to be part of the challenge and at the end of the challenge, there would only be a winner and a runner-up who will share the total amount from all the contributions between them in a ratio of 2:1. Hmmmm! So the remaining 8, what happens? They leave with nothing! Game on!

The idea of the challenge, though competitive, is also to create a community of support for one another where we can share tips on things we are finding helpful in the weight loss process or how we are going about the process, increase mutual accountability to one another knowing that others are watching out for us (we have to do weekly weigh-ins and share our weekly weight in the group), and also give each person a goal to work towards thereby increasing your chances of succeeding at the weight loss attempt. There is of course your money at stake here but an even greater prize if you focused and pushed yourself to succeed. So it is all set and we are good to go. I believe the expectation is that all of us would lose a significant amount of weight and given the 6-week duration, we will be well on our way to sustainable ongoing weight loss post challenge. I think it is a really great concept, but will it work?

This is not the first challenge of its kind also with work colleagues, although I was never part of the previous versions. And if my memory serves me right, they somehow never held out to the end and the participants either withdrew midway or lost steam/interest and the challenge did not end up meeting the intended goals. Thus, I have been keen to see how this particular challenge we have started will turn out and intend to study it keenly over the next 5 weeks to understand the factors that can make or mar a challenge.

My study questions are: Do group fitness challenges work i.e. are they effective at generating weight loss? What are the factors that will determine the outcome of a group challenge? Follow me over the next couple of weeks to find out the outcome of our challenge. By the way, the Easter weekend fell in the first week of the challenge, so trouble has started. I, for one, has already over-eaten this long weekend and now scratching my head to figure out a plan to quickly reverse any effect of over-indulgence in the new week. So far, my challenge group members are adamant that we weigh in tomorrow Tuesday irrespective of the break, so it is what we get, we get. I like the fire among the group. Everyone is in this to win, so let’s go there! Battle has just begun….