Hello Sunday Morning!

So if I hadn’t made my 365 day project hard enough for myself already, I’ve added yet another challenge to the mix.

Last Saturday my work (check out the awesome program I work for here!) ran a TedX style event called the BUiLD !deas Hub where we invite speakers from a range of different fields to come chat to our students about their areas of work and challenge to take part in their causes. This is always the biggest event of our year and pulls over 120 students each time which isn’t bad for an early Saturday morning! Unfortunately I missed most of the speakers as my netball final fell at the same time, however I was lucky enough to read the speech of one of our speakers when I returned to work on Monday and it’s been plaguing my mind ever since!

Jamie came to talk about a new challenge that’s transforming Australia, one productive Sunday morning at a time. Hello Sunday Morning challenges participants to say no to alcohol for a period ranging from 7 days to 1 year, and make the most of their Sunday mornings, without the limiting feeling of a hangover! With some scary statistics (Americans tell their friends to stop after having 5 drinks whilst Australians wait to tell their friends to stop after FOURTEEN drinks), it’s pretty obvious that Australia needs a shift in our current drinking culture and Hello Sunday Morning hope to do just that.

I was really impressed by their story (read about founder Chris Raine here, who went sober for a year) the concept and their goal of having 10,000 participants by 2013 and couldn’t get it out of my head all week. I kept telling myself and my colleagues, yeah it’s a great project, but I’m not a big drinker so this isn’t for me!

But perhaps that’s exactly the point, I was almost scared of giving up my freedom to even have a drink in moderation if I wanted to. I kept thinking of all the upcoming events I had; birthdays, dinners and a Pitbull concert too, I was ultimately scared of how I’d be ‘left out’ of the celebrations, social scene and dancing if I gave up alcohol cold turkey, even if I was only going to have 1 – 2 drinks anyway! So as I lay awake last night in bed making all these excuses I decided that it was time to shut up and sign-up!

I’m proud to say that I’ve just signed up for one month of Hello Sunday Morning, and plan to do another month once my first is finished if I can get 3 other friends to do it with me! J I’ll be blogging about my experiences here on my site, but you can also follow my actual HSM page here too.

As my 12 Week Body Transformation starts with Michelle Bridges on Monday morning, there was really no allowance for alcohol in the nutrition plan anyway so I’m making my goals work together! Look out for my post tomorrow featuring a run-down of my exercise and nutrition plan – we’re expected to do 6 days a week of exercise (!!!) but I’m sure it’s well worth the effort!

Are you interested in taking the Hello Sunday Morning challenge with me? Feel free to ask me questions or comment below – trust me, I had doubts about it too! I’d love to share this journey with as many people as possible. You can sign up here.