WHY THE NUMBERS 56 AND 64 and 8 WEEK CHALLENGE AND 15/56 TODAY

WHY THE NUMBER 56 AND 64 AND THE 8 WEEK CHALLENGE, oh and today I made recipe 15/56, the Spinach Crepes AND THEY WERE GREAT.......

Here's the answer to your question about
why there area 56 recipes and then
64...enough already......

For those of you who are wondering about the numbers, and why they were chosen. The 56 recipes represent 56 days of self improvement.  I have joined support groups at work for getting healthy, but I have gotten distracted by the competitive aspect and not by the actual goal which is to stay healthy and happy and have fun and enjoy the moment you are in.  So this time I decided to match my goals with a separate goal, which was to have 56 recipes I could turn to.  In the past when one of the goals was to eat five fruits and vegetables a day, I basically desperately measured the whole thing in a 5 cup container.  The problem with that was that the food was boring and inedible, at least that is the way I felt about it.  I needed to feel as though the food I was eating was elegant and dignified, so I found a number of recipes to match the number of days I would take on the following challenge.
WEEK ONE:  150 minutes of exercise
WEEK TWO:  5 fruits/vegetables (only one can be a juice) in a day at least 4 days in a week
WEEK THREE:  Sleep 7 to 8 hours minimum 4 nights in the week minimum
WEEK FOUR:  Stretch 10 minutes in a day minimum 4 days in a week
WEEK FIVE:  3 servings of whole grain in a day for a minimum of 4 days
WEEK SIX:  personal time of 10 minutes in a day for a minimum of 4 days
WEEK SEVEN:  strength training 20 minutes in a day for a minimum of 4 days
WEEK EIGHT:  healthy home made meals 4 days a week

I have done this before with the intention of incorporating these local self care recommendations into my daily life, and not been able to.  I have decided to set up an excel spread sheet with the days on the left and the behaviors on the top.  I am actually incorporating all 8 of the behaviors plus doubling up on Week Six every day,  on my sheet it shows some other areas of interest for me:  how many hours I work, how many steps (goal 10,000 daily, minimum 6,000), how much time I have for creativity (cooking, movies, writing my blog, other writing), and my lean muscle mass.   For women it should be under 35, for men under 25.  The measurement is done by measuring how thick your skin is around your umbilicus, which represents the amount of fat in your total body.  The "belly fat" is the fat that is the most associated with heart problems.  If all of this works I will have more energy, continue to love eating, have a permanent set of great recipes (right now, I use my blog when I go to the grocery store).

What is a typical day?
Sleep 8 hours, wake up and meditate for 20 minutes, yoga for 10 minutes, coffee and oatmeal (3 grains and 3 dried fruits, unfortunately this ends out being about 500 calories or more, way over my limit), prepare my meal for the day.  If I don't work that day I start out my exercise and weight lifting (I am incrementing by about 2.5 lbs every couple of weeks with dead weights), sometimes I try to reach 10,000 steps on the treadmill, it just depends on who else is in the workout room, if the room is not available I might try to get the difference in the evening. I average about 4,000 steps during work, etc. without the treadmill, if I can't get to the weights I will do 20 minutes of a DVD using my body as my weight or a kettleball).  I have 6 more weeks to go.  I love the sleep part so that will be no problem.  They say it takes 3 weeks of doing something new for it to be a habit, so the idea of doing something for one week, which in the past has never worked for me.......well now I understand why.  This third week is the difficult one, if I make it past this one, these behaviors may not be as secondary to my nature..........

The 64 recipes represent 4 recipes a week, to cover the Minnesota/North Dakota growing season as covered by my CSA.  I am currently working on a local foods wheel that will represent pictorially which foods are available when.   The grid part where I put the ingredient on the left in alphabetically order and number the time that it occurs and match it with a recipe, is a little more complicated.  So we will see.  I hope this answers any questions you may have had about those numbers.