Greg and Loren's 2013 30-Day Challenge Adventure

Happy 2013, Everybody.

We’ve had a great holiday season, traveling to Denmark and Sweden, visiting our friends and getting to spend some relaxing quality time together. Last night, we welcomed in the New Year by having a small gathering at our place and walking down to the beach to watch some midnight fireworks. Loren and Elinor even decided to take a midnight dip in the Mediterranean.

Greg and Loren iceskating at a rink in Malmo, Sweden.

We’re not doing any specific New Year’s resolutions this year. Instead, Greg got the genius idea of doing 12 sets of 30-day challenges, one for each month of 2013.  The fun thing about challenges is that they are non-intimidating periods of time wherein we can focus our attention on working at one goal. We’re going to keep a blog of the challenges as we do them. The point of these challenges is to test our own boundaries with habits that we have or to push us to try new and adventurous things. If you are interested in joining us in doing any of these challenges with us, just let us know, and we can have a support community.

This is the list of challenges and corresponding months.  We might edit them as we go, but this is the starting off point.

January	No Beer
February	Abdominal challenge
March	1-hour of foreign language learning everyday (Turkish)
April	Do yoga everyday
May	Vegetarian/vegan
June	Eliminate use of profane language
July	Keep a journal everyday
August	Strength training
September	Meditate everyday
October	No potato chips or fries
November	Cook a different meal everyday
December	Do/taste/learn a new thing each day

           Here’s a brief explanation of how and why we chose these challenges. No Beer in January was to encourage us to stop drinking the mediocre barley water that they call beer in Turkey and try more of the Turkish wines and the local drink, Raki. For February, April, and August, we wanted to try some physical challenges, to focus on some body parts and improve our individual yoga practices. In March, in an effort to better our Turkish, we will practice learning the language for one hour each day.  In May, October, and November, we will do some food challenges.  We both have a weakness for our potato snacks, and we’d like to try purposefully going off them.  In May, we’ll be going very low on the animal products in our diet -Loren’s going vegan and Greg will dabble in vegetarianism. The other challenges are just for personal betterment:  doing something new everyday in December, keeping a journal, starting a daily meditation practice, getting rid of the potty mouth, and learning some new recipes.

Wish us luck in our 2013 30 –Day Challenge Adventure!