Guest Bloggers: Bring on the challenge says Rochelle

This week's Guest Blogger is Rochelle Elgie, who works in our Finance Department. The Healthy Lifestyle Challenge came at a perfect time for Rochelle as she was ready to improve her health and understand more about whole foods and good fat.



My sister’s partner, Corey, is Paul Chek trained (Corrective Holistic Exercise Kinesiology) so aspects of Ben Warren’s lecture were familiar; I just hadn’t actually followed it. In the past I’d thought cutting out all the ‘yummy food’ was over the top and no one was going to deny me my coffee, biscuits, cakes, chocolates and takeaways!

Like most people, a group challenge gave me the motivation to give it a go. After a 20 hour caffeine withdrawal headache I started feeling great and had more energy. Researching what foods had protein in them and talking to Corey and others for meal ideas and inspiration really helped. Food became a fuel source and not a way to treat myself. After a couple of weeks of not eating so much sugar, food tasted sweet enough as it was.

I tried to make it as easy as possible by colour-coding my chart so the time/protein/fruit and veges are in different colours and there’s healthy food choices in the kitchen. Meals are planned and I always have almonds, prunes and fresh fruit on hand at work. I bought a stylish Eco tanka for the gym and the staff at Aspyre and of course Tina and Eloise have kept me motivated.

I’m looking forward to going on this journey with everyone for the next few weeks and making changes for a lifetime.

Guest Bloggers: ACC Activesmart – My experience

We spoke to Ansonica Botha, a project manager for council, on how she's trying to incorporate exercise in to her lifestyle as part of the challenge. Find out how she got on.


I recently signed up for the “Healthy Lifestyle Challenge” and an important part of a healthy lifestyle is getting some exercise. But where to start? I didn’t want to sign up to a gym or join a class and felt a bit lost. Tina sent me the link to a very interesting site. It’s run by ACC and can be found here www.activesmart.co.nz

ActiveSmart provides free online and customised training plans that have been designed by experts for all levels of fitness and goals. You can set up a training plan to walk, run cycle or a combination of any or all of them. It covers beginners to advanced sports people. You can even train for a specific event and make sure you peak at the right time. The plans have been designed by expert fitness professionals, so it must be better than anything I can come up with on my own.

First thing I did was register. This was quick and easy. Next you pick your activity and goals. I picked the “Introduction to Running” plan. This plan guides you, over 6 weeks, to where you can run continuously for 20 minutes. That remains to be seen as I’ve never been much of a runner. A health questionnaire follows to make sure that the plan you picked isn’t too advanced for you and that it is safe for you to exercise.

From this information the website created a training plan for me.You can customise the training plan to fit your needs in the Training Plan view. In my case the plan showed my training days as Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I don’t like exercising on Fridays, so I just dragged the sessions to Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. On training days you automatically receive an e-mail with information on your session. You record and track your progress and achievements on the website.

Once you have a plan, the site looks different when you load it. You are directed straight to your own personalised Dashboard with information and links relating to your training plan.

I have completed my first training session and I am looking forward to the next one.