Couples who like to do things together

I work a 9-to-5 type job and spend most of my day in front of a computer. My husband also works full time and in our free time we enjoy doing things together like hiking, gardening, cooking and even local 5K runs. We also like getting together with friends to play board games or cards.

My husband’s company does not offer good health insurance so we pay the benefits access fee to cover him under my King County benefits. This means we both have to participate in the Healthy Incentives^SM Program.

We chose the Live Well Challenge. Overall, we are pretty healthy people. But we know that there are things that we could be doing better.

I know that I usually don’t eat as many fruits and vegetables each day as I should. So I picked the Eat Smart focus area. It lets me easily track the number of fruits and vegetables I get each week to see if I am meeting the national recommendations. My husband wanted to track the number of minutes of physical activity he does each week. So he picked the Move More focus area.

The Live Well Challenge lets us each track what we are most interested in but do it together as a team. Since we can both see how the other one is doing every week it lets us encourage each other to do a little more each week. Being able to see how we are doing as a team compared to other teams also motivates us to stick to our plan.

We wanted a tool that lets use keep track of things that we are already doing well but also rewards us for doing a little extra. We like that the Live Well Challenge is more like a game. The competitive aspect helps keep us motivated and helps us work together as a team to eat healthier and be more active.

Logging our activity doesn’t take much time and we like the fact that if we get busy we have 3 weeks to go back and enter all of the information online.

Even though it does not count toward earning gold, we also like that we can earn extra points and get virtual awards for doing additional activities and completing quizzes.

• Anyone who is motivated by a little friendly competition.
• Anyone who likes being part of a team.
• Couples who want to complete an individual plan together.
• People who like a defined start and end date for their individual action plan.

• You must have regular computer access to play.
• Register at the Live Well Challenge website by Jan. 30, 2011.
• The 2010 Live Well Challenge officially begins on Jan. 31 and ends on Apr. 10, 2011.
• Log nutrition or physical activity five days each week of the 10-week competition to earn gold.