And So We Begin...

What a great group! Last night was our first STF gathering and it was better than I’d even hoped. New friends were made, a few tears shed and many, many laughs were shared! They say the first step is the hardest; well this was more than just a step we took, it was truly a leap of faith. To sit in someone’s (almost clean but toasty warm) living room with people who in some cases you were meeting for the first time to share your personal stories with, proved I think to be very liberating for all of us. If you missed it, come on to the next one (1/29 @ 6:30, venue yet to be decided) and be a part of this energetic, inspiring, fun group!

In the meantime, continue to check this site. There will eventually be several contributors but until we all put our techie-hats on, I’ll be doing most of the posting. The goal however is for any member to access the blog and share their story, maybe a great tip they have, a recipe or new gadget… anything that may help us achieve our goals and keep us motivated is game.

You will notice along the sidebar to the right are various fields. Let me explain what those are about.

Our Journey. This is a list of who is a member of the STF blog. Of course you don’t have to be a member to view it, but to contribute to it you do. Click on the name of a member and you will see her profile.

Blog Archive. Pretty self explanatory.

Categories. As the content of this blog grows, categorizing each post becomes more important. If down the road you are looking for something and you know Kim (for instance) posted it, you can click on “Kim” and only her posts will come up. That helps to narrow your search. I intend to create a category for each member as they submit posts. We might have Recipes, Fitness tips, Success stories, Rants (my fav!)… whatever! Again… it’s a WP (work in progress!).

Blogs We Like. This is where we shamelessly promote other blogs. I use the word shameless because at the moment you’ll notice the only blog on there is mine! I love blogging and quite frankly I miss it, but time has gotten away from me and so too has my blog. I intend to correct that soon… STF will probably give me a lot of new material… just saying!

Links We Love. This is going to be great. Click on the links and see what they have to offer. Judy gave us a great one at the meeting last night, it’s called FitDay.com. Julie told us about MyRecipe.com which offers a healthy cooking section; I’ll be adding both of those links today. Keep your eyes and ears open for others that we can benefit from, they’re out there.

Sitemeter. Scroll down to the very bottom of the blog and you’ll see where I added Sitemeter. This is a tool that tracks our web traffic. It’s fun to watch how many people are tuning in, but in the spirit of full disclosure, I started the counter at 100. 24 (our current count) may not be too impressive now but my ChrissyCanCant blog has an amazing 15,127 hits on it. (Thanks Mom and Dad!)

Bottom line, this blog is one more tool in our arsenal. Ideally we love getting together for some face time, and planning group activities around fitness is something we’re all looking forward to. But when life gets in the way, and we can’t make those times work, we’ll have our STF blog to keep us connected. The common theme I heard over and over last night from the group is this… None of us want to be tied to a number, a size or an unrealistic expectation any longer. Instead, we all have our number one goal set as better health, which will only be achieved with better habits. Eating wiser and moving more, that’s it. We’re not here to reinvent the wheel, the wheel is fine. It’s our tires that need rotated.

Change our mindset, change our lives.
Let’s do this!