Diet Bet: Friday Favorites

4 years ago I lost 60 lbs.  Maybe someday I'll write about that journey.  It was both hard work and very easy.

I have also beat the statistics by keeping the weight off.

Mostly.

It's that mostly part that bothers me sometimes.

The truth is that in the last 4 years I have never gotten anywhere near putting all the weight back on.  I have found it easy to keep at least 40 lbs down from my top weight.

It's those last 20 lbs that have a tendency to creep back on when I'm under stress.  And then I have to get all disciplined with myself and work them back off again.

The thing is, it was easier to stay motivated to lose weight the first time when the results were dramatic and everyone around me was encouraging me.

No one notices when I am struggling to take off those final 20 lbs, again.

But I found a great tool to keep me encouraged and on track

I have now completed 2 month long diet bets and have doubled my money.  Basically the way it works is you put up a certain amount of money to enter a bet.  You then have four weeks to lose 4% of your body weight.  Everyone's money goes into a pool, the diet bet people take their cut and at the end of 4 weeks the pot is split between everyone who managed to lose at least 4% of their body weight.

I knew that losing 4% was very doable for me but that I would have to work on it.  I knew myself and knew that if I put money up, there was no way I was going to let myself fail.  

For me diet bet was the perfect way to keep myself accountable and on track.  The last day before my last weigh in I was at a March Madness party and I know I would have overeaten if it wasn't for the bet.

I'm not getting paid by dietbet or anything, I just thought it was a cool concept that worked for me and some of you might want to know about it.

You can get a group together and do a bet or you can just join in one.  You can do up to 3 at a time.  I just joined a public one.   

I put up $60 originally for 2 different $30 games that ran at the same time.  I then plowed some of my winnings back into another 2 games the following month.   When I won those games also, I decided I was too close to goal weight to want to do more bets so I cashed out at $131.  

Not bad.  

Want to know what exciting things I did with the winnings?  Paid for Oldest Girl's SAT test. *

Yup, I live on the edge.

______________________

*Mostly just because the winnings are paid out via paypal and when I went to pay for the SAT I saw the paypal option and thought, why not.

Rise of the Time Lords Friday Favorites

I write this blog for me because I enjoy writing, it keeps me sane, writing helps me know what I'm thinking in a way that just thinking doesn't do.

I write this blog for my children (and future grandkids, thus the blog title) because my Dad's death drove home the fact that someday I won't be here or able to tell them these things and I want them to know me.

I write this blog for you, whoever happens to be reading it, because I like the thought of others reading my words even if I don't know them.

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

So in the spirit of this blog as a place to share with myself, my family and the wider world at large,  I thought I'd try using Fridays (since I love aliteration) to share some of the things I have come across in this life that I really, really like.  If you have any favorites you want to share in the comments please do so.

Today I'll start with a book




Rise of the Time Lords: A Geek's Guide to Christianity by Michael Belote

Here's the quote from the back of the book, "Rise of the Time Lords shares the gospel for geeks: how we can learn about the trinity from a Pringles can, heaven from Dr. Who, grace from air conditioners, and the nature of man from Schrodinger's cat."

It was the title that got me first. Time Lords is of course a reference to the British Doctor Who series of which we are big fans in this house.

But you don't have to be Dr. Who fans to enjoy this book.  He also references Flatland, Star Wars, Star Trek, Calvin and Hobbes, and lots of engineering stuff.  Each chapter takes a science fiction or science principal and then uses it to explain a theological point.

The book is worth the price for the pringles can/Flatland explanation of the Trinity alone.

You don't have to be a total geek to appreciate the book but it will help.

For our family, it was perfect.  We read it for family devotions, reading a bit of a chapter after dinner each night.  It was the best reading material we have ever found for our family for devotions.

Of course we are total geeks.

My dad would have loved this book.

I should warn you that this book is not light reading.  Both the science and the theology take some thought and you won't breeze through it.  But it was very accessible to our family consisting of one extremely intelligent adult who knows a lot about science and mathy things, one somewhat intelligent adult who knows a lot about theology, one high schooler who has taken a lot of math and science although she's not really a math and sciency person, one high schooler who likes math and science and loves geekdom in all its glory, and one middle schooler who lives for math and science.