March Madness: Outside the Box Challenge

Happy March 1st!!!

So, Leah and I decided it was time to spice things up a bit and create a little blog challenge. After all, we’re in the home stretch of winter, and we needed a way to make those weeks fly by! So…consider this your one-way ticket to a happy, healthy spring and summer.

We realized that this time of year, we can all feel stuck in a rut, and we wanted to inspire you to bust a rut, move outside your comfort zones, and, well, think outside the box when it comes to healthy living. Get ready to have your box blown wide open!

Here’s how it’s going to work. Starting Monday, March 1 and ending Saturday May 1, we’re going to give you a new “outside the box” task to complete. Hopefully it will give you an opportunity to try something you haven’t done before, whether it’s a new way to cook, a new way to work out, or a new way to stay motivated to meet all your healthy goals!

And instead of having you email us about your experience, we’re actually going to have you share it with everyone else! After all, our readers are all pretty kick-ass, and I think it’s a great idea for you all to get to know each other.

Each week (any time after the challenge is posted on Monday through the following Sunday at midnight), you’ll submit a post — it can be text, a photo, video, audio, whatever! — explaining how you met the challenge that week. You’ll submit your posts directly to the Outside the Box Challenge blog. That way, we can track your progress and you can check out the cool things other people have been doing to complete the various challenges.

For example, say the challenge is to try a vegetable you’ve never tried before. You could post a picture of bok choy, with a caption explaining how you tried to cook it and what you thought of it. Or you could post a video that shows just how disgusting you thought that bok choy was. Or you could just write about your experience. Whatever you want! As long as you document it in some way on the blog, you’re golden for that week.

What’s even cooler is that we’ve teamed up with a bunch of companies to bring you FABULOUS PRIZES!

First, we’re going to have several weekly prizes, which we’ll announce at the beginning of that week. That means the more weeks you stay in the challenge, the more prizes you’ll be eligible to win. Some of these prizes include…

• Core Fusion Abs & Arms and Thighs & Glutes DVDs
• A Culinista Kitchen home-cooking bundle
• A signed copy of Tom Venuto’s The Body Fat Solution
• The Mayo Clinic Diet and diet journal
• A Stoneyfield Organics prize pack with free yogurt and other goodies

In most cases, there will be more than one weekly winner, which means you’ll have a good chance of taking home swag at some point!

And, of course, we’ll have a Grand Prize! The Grand Prize winner will be selected at random from all the participants who stay in the challenge for the entire nine weeks. So what do you get if you take it all? We’re still adding shizz (cause you know we can’t resist showering people with healthy gifts) but you can plan on the overall winner receiving…

• Amazing Grass Chocolate Green Superfood and Amazing Meal Pomegranate Protein Powder, plus samples of all their other products
• Chobiani CHO-case (i.e. a whole lot of Greek yogurt!) and tote bag
• $50 worth of Trader Joe’s groceries

All these prizes are all things we’ve tried and loved and are excited to share with you!

To recap….

What: The Outside the Box Challenge, presented by Shedding It and Nutritionista
Who: YOU! The more participants, the better.
Why: To bust you out of your rut! We want to challenge you to get you outside your box each week.
Where: You can submit all your posts and find the new weekly challenges here.
How: To get started, simply submit a post showing or telling how you completed this week’s challenge before Sunday, 3/7, at 11:59 PM PST! And if you Tweet about it, use the hash tag #OTBchallenge.

Are you in? Head over to the Outside the Box Challenge page to find out what this week’s challenge is!

Tagged as: contests, Fun, March Madness, Outside the Box Challenge