Well, folks it is now 2 September and time for my next 30 day challenge. For a little background, last month I started setting myself little 30 day challenges where I would do or not do something every day for 30 days. Last month's challenge was to run at least 3k everyday, and I succeeded in doing just that.

Whilst I really enjoyed last month's challenge and will be doing it again on a less rigid basis, there was one thing I noticed which I thought was a bit odd and is part of the reasoning behind selecting this month's challenge. Despite running everyday and running almost 100km more than normal, I didn't actually lose any weight. In fact I put on ½kg. This isn't a lot and I'm by no means a fattie nor built like a brick outhouse, but I had expected to actually lose some weight. Now I know water retention and all that sort of stuff could have affected my weight on that day, but even then it wouldn't be anything significant enough to cancel out the weight I expected to lose.

A little bit of reflection soon revealed the most likely culprit: snacking. Last month I did a fair amount of pre and post dinner snacking. Claire and I popped to Waitrose quite a few times last month and everytime we do we tend to pick up a few beers, maybe a bottle of wine and quite a selection of little nibbles. I know I also definitely went through at least 4 large bags of sweets (hmmmmm, Sports Mix) as part of my after dinner snacking.

So this month's challenge (we started yesterday) is a joint effort for Claire and me:

Challenge 2: No pre or post dinner snacking.

I'm not going to rule out actual dedicated starters and puddings, ie things on restaurant menus, as we don't actually plan these and don't go out for dinner very often, but no more nibbles from Waitrose unless they're actually part of our planned dinner. This should be a good challenge for our wallets as well as my waistline.

Thinking up this challenge has made me think about some future ones and I think I'm going to alternate between "doing" and "not doing" challenges. That should keep things interesting.