#gethealthy Week 5: The End of the Challenge...and Back to Square One

Well, the first month of 2012 is officially over. Ok, so I'm a few days late but you know what I mean.

It's also meant the end of the January Healthy Every Week Challenge.

So, if you have followed a weekly goal like this for a good month, you should be well pepped up to continue the same way for the rest of the year, right?

Well no, not exactly.

You can have challenges set for you by someone else, and be rallied on constantly to help you achieve those goals. But that doesn't just mean going through the motions of each challenge. You need to make sure that the goal matches what you want to achieve, so that you can make it work for you.

And for me, that was kind of the obstacle.

At the start of this challenge, I wanted to use it as a way to explore healthy weight gain. Here's a quick recap of the goals:

Week 1: Eat Breakfast
Week 2: Eat More Whole Grains
Week 3: Cook at Home
Week 4: Eat More Fruits and Vegetables

If you read the roundups about each of the above challenges, you'll have seen that none of them were particularly alien to me. But I didn't have a clue how to go about them with the healthy weight gain goal in mind. And to be honest, it's only now on reflection of the challenge, that I've realised what I need to do:

Just eat more.

Yes it's completely ridiculous. It's a statement that is obvious as saying to someone who wants to lose weight, "Just eat less and exercise more." Go ahead, slap my forehead and shout "DUR!"

But the reason why I've declared such an obvious statement is because this is the extent of my knowledge on the subject of healthy weight gain. And knowing to 'just eat more' simply isn't enough.

And so the end of this challenge has brought me back to the start again. I did aim for this challenge to push me into looking specifically into this, and it's definitely done that.

Over the past few weeks, I've started to research specifically into healthy weight gain. And yes, as expected, the hunt for this info seems to be a weight-gain-needle in a weight-loss-haystack situation.

But I've realised that there is help out there. And it has opened up so many questions and ideas that I just haven't figured out what to do with it all yet. So you'll have to watch this space to see what happens next...

Other Hungry Jenny healthy food thoughts you might be interested in