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Kudos to Joe over at the Cr8 Health & Fitness support and accountability site (http://cr8health.ning.com) for taking the 30 day challenge! Visit the site to see Joe’s progress.

It has been about two weeks, so I want to talk about strategies for reaching your goals, either weight gain or loss.

Every two weeks is a good point to evaluate progress and make changes to your plan if necessary. It is enough time to establish the current trend based on your nutrition intake and energy expenditure.

My weight over the past two weeks has been in a narrow range. Between 195.0 and 196.5 for the most part. It is safe to say that my energy intake and output have been equalized.

Since my goal is to lose bodyfat, I now know that something needs to change; either I need to take in less calories or expend more energy through exercise.

My first choice would always be to up my activity level, primarily because I don’t want to lose muscle, so the higher I can keep my calories while also losing bodyfat the better.

This is an important principle - you can only drop calories so much before you start to get diminishing returns. It is also very difficult to get all your micronutrients - your vitamins and minerals - on a calorie restricted diet.

That doesn’t mean you can go hog wild. Some calorie restraint will be necessary, we just need to continue to monitor and adjust as we go.

So my plan for the next two weeks is to increase my activity level while keeping my calories where they are.

What’s your plan?