Oh hey there lovely ladies and gentlemen!

Can I just say how excited I am for the next 28 days? Very. I love doing monthly challenges. My friends could tell you about all the random challenges I've done over the past couple of years. Mostly they would groan, because even though challenges can be amazing opportunities for growth for the person doing them- they sometimes aren't for those that have to deal with the negative side effects. Like when I gave up all technology for a month, my friends were not crazy about me becoming a ghost.

But *this* challenge is not like that. Not only will it help all of us doing the challenge form a healthy sangha (community), it will also help those suffering from Crohn's like our Holly dearest. So I already feel really good about it all!

Everyone needs to be challenged in different ways, so allow me to tell you how I will be challenging myself over the next month or so...

This challenge actually fits perfectly into a larger series of goals for the rest of the summer. Much like Holly's 62 Days of Summer, I created a schedule where every week I add a new goal/ habit onto the last. The focus of the rest of July is my health and the big three: Sleep, exercise and nutrition.

So during this challenge I will be:

1) Sleeping no less than 6 hours a night
2) Doing yoga for at least 20 minutes a day, ideally an hour four times a week
3) Biking everyday
4) Following the Thrive Diet: no dairy, no eggs, no coffee, no gluten, no corn syrup, no white sugar, white flour, white potatoes or white rice. Oh ya, and no beer!

The first three goals are pretty reasonable, as I've been following them more or less for the past month. Now, the new goal, and the real challenge is Goal # 4, which I'm most excited about since I'm doing it with all of the Pranalife crew.

I've decided to be pretty strict with the Thrive Diet. I completely understand some not wanting to, but I really want to kick it up a notch. I just celebrated my 8 year anniversary of being vegetarian (yay!!) so removing dairy from my diet is not much of a stretch. I've NEVER liked milk, I prefer coconut ice cream to regular ice cream and I get really sick of eggs. The only thing I'm sort of sad about is cheese... dear melty brie, we will reunite, I promise.

As for coffee, I already gave coffee up for 40 days this year for Lent and it was easy peasy! And I was a 2-coffees a day lass. I just replace it with green tea.

I'm really interested to see how my body reacts to eliminating allergens and all the white refined yucky foods so I definitely plan to stick to those as much as possible.

To be realistic, I will give myself 5 cheat days for the entire month, that I may or may not use.

So there you have it, world, all my goals written out in detail... I can't just forget about them now!

Good luck to everyone else following this Challenge, or whatever challenges they're facing =)

As for mine? Bring it on!!!