100 Days Challenge: Are you ready to change your life?

Remember those resolutions you formed around January 1st? How’re you doing on them? I, for one, have failed hard at multiple of mine, and that’s what today’s post is all about.

Today (September 22nd) marks 100 days until 2017! Crazy, right? This means you’ve still got 100 days to get yourself back on track with saving money, not spending money, eating better, and working out…or for me, all of the above. Here’s how it works:

Consistency transforms behaviors into habits. Adopting good daily habits can only happen if you consistently engage in those habits every day. For the next 100 days, focus on engaging in one activity for 100 days in a row. By the end of the 100 days that daily activity will become a daily habit. Engaging in an activity for 100 days helps create the neural network infrastructure necessary to forge a habit (apparently this really only takes 21 days – but who doesn’t want to finish the year strong?).

For me, I’ll be focusing on my eating, working out, and MONEY (you knew that was in there). Essentially, my 100 day challenges look like this:

1. No fast food or drive thru food (McDonald’s, Wendy’s, etc.). Chipotle and Panera do not count as fast food for me (full-disclosure).
2. Work out every day (minimum 10 minutes per day). This can be anything as long as I do it for 10+ minutes.
3. Reign in my food budget. As in, stick to my food budget – no exceptions, no finagling of the budget to find money, no categorizing food purchases as some other category where I have money left (I can’t be the only one who does this??).

If you’re interested in taking your own 100 day challenge, here are some fun, money examples:

• Pay cash for everything for 100 days. You will be surprised at how reluctant you are to part with the money.
• Don’t take your wallet with you during lunch breaks – that way you cannot be tempted with impulse purchases.
• Save $1 a day for 100 days. Every day put $1 into a jar and don’t touch it.
• Stick to your budget 100% for 100 days. No exceptions.
• Buy nothing new for the next 100 days and with the exception of food, toiletries and essential items such as medications – don’t buy anything new or 2nd hand. Use what you have already. –> I’m essentially doing this one too because of my spending fast.

Would you like to get more out of the next 100 days? We may feel that we are doing OK on the goal setting, but then we end up two-thirds of the way through the year and those goals are all but deserted. Most people set goals that are 1 year, 5 years and sometimes even 10 years down the track. Is it any wonder we can be forgiven for not remembering to work on our goals over that huge expanse of time?

The 100 day challenge focuses your attention on these long term goals – BUT – into 100 day blocks of time. What can you achieve in 100 days? Well you would be surprised at how much you can achieve in 100 days – and we do that by focusing our attention on 100 single days. We can’t put off until tomorrow, because the challenge is all about TODAY.

What can you do TODAY to get the most out of the last 100 days of 2016? Ready. Set. Go.

-ECD

 

Update: 1/1/17

Hi friends,

So, my 100 days challenge ended with a bang (fireworks, quite literally), but happy 100 days challenge to me! I managed to not eat fast food at all, I was about $15 over my food budget in December, and I completely fell apart on the working out. But hey, it’s progress, right?

<3 from ECD