6Matthews

My Heart Challenge Wrap up! #myheartchallenge

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Aug 012016

Hi folks! Well it has been a month now since we were last updating about the My Heart Challenge, and it has been a busy month. We have been running all over. It has been good for the kids and their screen time to be away from the screens. I sit here now writing this after the challenge has finished, and I have some interesting thoughts about it. Those will be later. First, lets talk about what we have been doing this past month!

First up, was the Twilight Walk 5k. We went to Murray park with everyone from the Heart Challenge and covered 5 kilometers! Leatha and I sped walked, while Tristan and Cameron decided to run. Cameron did great and finished first in the family, while Tristan ended up Second! We thought that Tristan would have to be carried at the end, but he ran the whole way. They had a drawing afterwards where the kids won some fun prizes and I won the $50 gift card to Harmons, which I promptly used to buy the rest of the groceries for our camping trip.

My Heart Challenge June 8th to June 29th #myheartchallenge

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Jun 302016

Hello everyone! As you can see, it has been a busy month and we have not gotten a blog up for a while. But, fear not! We will have a great recap!

Like I said, this has been a crazy month. Let’s go back to June 9th. After finding out that we were not going to move, we decided to remake our entire house. We moved everything, cleaned all of the carpets, and rearranged all of the furniture to make everything seem new. That has been a ton of work, and we still are not quite finished with everything. Sometimes I think it would be easier to move. But, through all of it, we have been moving and active as well as lifting all of the stuff in the house. We have slacked on the formal “exercise” time, but we are still moving! Our increased activity is really showing up, not only in our waistlines, but in our endurance as well.

On Saturday the 11th, we started out at the Riverton Hospital health fair. It is fun to go around those events and learn some more healthy things, but we were really there to get new bike helmets for everyone. We are going to get our bikes out and fixed up after we get home from vacation, and we all needed new helmets. We learned a bunch more about being healthy. And then we raided the fruit box. It was great that they had fruit available for snacking.

2016 Riverton Health Fair Photo ED0611104921

My Heart Challenge June 1st to June 7th #myheartchallenge

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Jun 072016

Hello again! Well we had another wild week getting out and getting active for the Heart challenge. That isn’t quite right. We had another wild week getting out and getting active for us, BECAUSE of the Heart Challenge. This week all of the kids were home from school. That was hard to keep them limited to their 1 hour of screen time….They didn’t do as well this week as some of the others. But we are still not watching the TV or the computer even a third as much as they did last summer. It is a dramatic improvement. We are also getting out more of our board games, legos and even books! Leatha has always read like her life depended on it, but the others are really making it a point now.

Saturday was Cameron’s Birthday! He finally turned 13 and was a little bit crazy about it. We did a bunch of outdoor activities in between opening presents and doing our regular household chores. We started out in the morning, at the giant kick off party held by Salt Lake count libraries. They were kicking off the summer reading program. We do the program every year, one, because we like to read, and two, we get free passes to the Natural History Museum if we complete the program. It is a bunch of fun. So was the kick off party.

The kids got to sit in fire trucks again and learn some fun things about DNA, as well as play in some bounce houses.

Cameron thought it would be fun to sit in the back of the police truck, and then close the door. Continue reading »

My Heart Challenge May 25th to May 31 #myheartchallenge

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Jun 012016

Hello again! Well this week I turned in Week #7 of the My Heart Challenge reports. It sure doesn’t seem like we have been doing this for 7 weeks. It is almost becoming “normal” for us to go out and play around and not watch TV. I am glad the TV doesn’t have feelings, because they would be hurt I am sure.

This past week we were very busy getting the kids out of school and to all of the end of year stuff that they have to do.

Leatha graduated from 9th grade, so there was an assembly and a dance for her before she got to go to Lagoon.

Cameron got kind of gypped, he just got out of school.

Amelia got an award at her school for being a good student, so we had an assembly for that as well as a picnic lunch there in the school that parents got to attend.We had a dinner with all of the Grandparents to celebrate Leatha’s Promotion, and that doesn’t even take into account any exercise! We didn’t get our 10000 steps every day until Saturday, but we did go to the park, and, while watching the kids, we used the playground equipment to do pullups, and some modified pushups and other strength exercises. Then we took it easy on Sunday, waiting out the rain. It is amazing how much we DON’T do when we can’t go outside.

My Heart Challenge May 15-24 Part 2 #myheartchallenge

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May 262016

This is part 2 of a very long post! If you haven’t, please read part 1 here

This week Brenda was doing the stairs at work and said she was able to do 5 flights before she had to stop for a minute, and that is up from 3 flights just a couple of weeks ago. She then did the other 9 flights. If you didn’t know, she works on the 14th floor at Intermountain Medical Center, and walking up the stairs is a good way for her to get some cardio in while she is at work. And these are not the standard flights of stairs, they are wider, a bit taller and about 3 stairs longer than a standard stair case.

We also had another nutrition class this past week, talking about planning out meals and making sure we are getting healthy ingredients to fill each meal with. The kids got to come to this class, or at least a parallel class that was taught by one of the dieticians from Primary Children’s hospital. They learned about the My Plate method of making sure you are getting the right portions of food at each meal, and then we all got together and planned out a week of meals.

And finally, Tuesday Brenda and I got to take a tour of Harmon’s Grocery store as part of the challenge. It was interesting to note that Harmon’s has 6 full time dieticians that rotate around their stores and are available to answer questions. You can even set up appointments for them to take you on your own grocery store tour and help you choose healthy options. Another great thing about Harmon’s (no they are not paying me to talk about them, but I would gladly accept donations if they did) is that on the shelves, they have green labels that say “Dietician’s Choice” under a bunch of products. These have been determined by the dieticians to be lower in sugars, sodium and high in protein or fiber, so they are good choices to grab if you are in a hurry.

My Heart Challenge May 15-24 Part 1 #myheartchallenge

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May 242016

Hello everyone. This is the latest post about our journey through the My Heart Challenge! We are just over 1/3 of the way through now, and doing better than ever.

Last week we went to the park 4 times, doing something different each time. One time we went and played baseball, one time playing basketball, one time just general around the park, and one time some of us played tennis while the others played on the playground and did strength training on the jungle gyms.

We have found fun ways to get our steps in as well. We were in the tennis court at the park, and Amelia kept throwing the balls to the far sides of the court…I told her to throw them to me, but she said that I needed my steps and she was helping! It is fun to get all of the kids involved in being outside and moving and playing hard. It is really a bummer when it rains or is cold, we REALLY want to be outside! Continue reading »

My Heart Challenge May 8-14 #myheartchallenge

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May 202016

Hello everyone. This post is not a recap of the first part of the challenge but it is about the last week! It all started on Mothers Day this week. While we didn’t do much on Mothers Day as far as exercise, but we were ready to hit it hard on Monday. You know, there is a debate over when the week starts and ends, in our family we tend to use Sunday as the end of the week. But the calendar says the week starts on Sunday.

Monday we got started with exercise again. We are still eating pretty well, even if we slacked on our vegetable and fruit consumption. We have had to figure out a different budget that lets us have more money available to keep fresh fruits and veggies around. Monday and Tuesday we were a little short on fresh stuff, but we were able to stock up again on Wednesday. As I sit here writing this on Monday morning, we are almost out of fresh stuff again! We have eaten a bag of apples, a bag of pears, a bunch of bananas and most of a case of oranges. Not to mention the broccoli, and spinach. We try to keep some good veggies in the freezer as well, but we like the fresh stuff. Continue reading »

My Heart Challenge #3 #myheartchallenge

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May 112016

Hello again! Well, In this post I continue to chronicle the first 3 weeks of the My Heart Challenge!

If you noticed, we have added a new element here at 6 Matthews. Over there to the left <—– each of us will be posting a thought about the heart challenge or some things we are doing to be more heart healthy. These may not be updated every day, but a couple of times each week. Each of the kids is writing their own thoughts about the challenge and what they are doing to be healthy. Check back often! I will also be posting a “digest” of these posts each week.

And now the news… We had our first Physical activity class on the 26th of April. We went over some basic exercises and the need to do both cardio training for our hearts, as is the focus of the challenge, but also strength training to make our bodies work more efficiently and keep us healthy overall. We also got some of the stretch bands to use in resistance training. Brenda has taken hers to work and uses them to do some resistance exercises while she sits at her desk and works.

My Heart Challenge update 2 #myheartchallenge

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May 092016

Hello again! We are back with more updates from the My Heart Challenge! Eventually, I will be posting each week, but for now, I am going to catch up with what we have done over the past couple of weeks. From our last post, we started the challenge on the 14th of April.

During this challenge, there are several classes that we will be attending that cover everything from exercise to nutrition to some overall change classes. We attended the first of these on the 19th.

It was the creating change class, that had some good tips on how to get our minds ready to change habits and lifestyle, as well as be good parents during this change. It was very informative.

It was good for us, but we had already started changing! We took the kids bowling on the 18th. Brenda and I have not been bowling for years, and Amelia and Tristan had never been. They had fun just learning how to get the ball down the alley. We went to a place that had bumpers that would raise for the younger kids, and retract for the older ones. It all proved quite a challenge for everyone, and more of a workout than we were expecting. That happens when you swing all of that weight for a couple of hours. We bowled 2 full games and part of a third before we were finished.

Week 1 of the My Heart Challenge #myheartchallenge

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May 072016

Well Hello! To those of you who are new here, welcome. For the next few weeks we are going to be chronicling our experience in the IHC My Heart Challenge. The challenge this year is for families. They chose 8 families to participate, and we were picked, based on this video:

After we were chosen, we had a couple of weeks to get ready for the whole challenge. This challenge is all about being more active and heart healthy, with diet and exercise changes that will make all of our hearts stronger and ultimately let us all live longer!

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