Get Healthy in 8 Weeks, Win an iPad New Years Challenge

Today, I am announcing my New Years Challenge for all of you. If you haven’t made an accountable resolution to get healthy, here is your opportunity. Instead of focusing on your weight, I am challenging you to look at your overall health. I want to help boost your energy, increase your sleep, better your moods and speed up your metabolism. Whoever improves their health the most, is going to win an iPad Air or iPad Mini.

So how are we going to measure all of these things? I’ve partnered with my buddies at InsideTracker to bring you this incredible opportunity. I’ve used InsideTracker in the past to discover that I get most of my vitamins from real food but that I eat a little too much sugar. See my post from earlier today. I thought I could balance my sweet tooth with exercise but as it turns out, I was running into the red zone and despite not seeing any changes in my weight, I was feeling it in my mood, sleep, cravings, skin and other things come along with an elevated blood sugar. Read more about my experience here. I have decent health insurance but to get these tests at doctor would have cost me more than 2x as much and that doesn’t even factor in the recommendations or waiting time to get an appointment.

If you’re not in the mood to read, watch the video here that I just uploaded to my YouTube Channel!

Here’s how the challenge works:

Everyone who wants to participate needs to take two blood tests, one before and one after the challenge. After you take your initial blood test, InsideTracker will give you really helpful nutrition recommendations so you can improve your blood levels. Follow your recommendations and you’ll see great results. At the end of the challenge you’ll take a second test to see how much you have optimized your levels and improved your health. Whoever improves the most will receive an iPad Air or iPad Mini! During the challenge, we will have weekly email tips, exclusive Google+ Hangouts with myself and The Red Sox’ nutritionist and a private Facebook Group for you to ask questions, find inspiration and stay motivated. 

InsideTracker is offering two options for blood tests, so there are really two different challenges depending on which you chose:

Option 1: InsideTracker offers a home kit. The home kit is great because it is really convenient. They mail it to you, you put a few drops of blood into a cartridge and mail it back and your results are available online in about a week. The home kit only tests a handful of blood markers, mostly related to energy and metabolism. You’ll see your glucose levels, your cholesterol levels, and your triglyceride levels. These are important to good health so the home kit is really useful. And of course you’ll see your personalized optimal zones and have access to InsideTracker’s nutrition recommendations to help you improve your health. Here is my experience taking the home kit. 

Option 2: InsideTracker’s Fitness plan tests for a lot more than the home kit does. In addition to energy and metabolism, they test you for bone and muscle health, strength and endurance levels and some important minerals. The Fitness test covers almost 3 times more than the home kit, but you do have to go get your blood drawn. Fortunately, InsideTracker has a partnership with LabCorp so you can go to any one of their 1,500 locations throughout the U.S. and it takes about 10 minutes.Here is my experience taking the fitness plan test. 

For home kit users, the most improved person will win a new iPad Mini with Retina Display. And for Fitness plan users, the winner will get a new iPad Air. If you already have an iPad or if you would like to get a higher-end model, InsideTracker will give you a gift card for either $400 for the iPad Mini or $500 for the iPad Air. There will be several other prizes as well for people who make big improvements.

As for the challenge itself, simply go to InsideTracker.com/SarahFit and select which challenge you are interested in. Use code: FITCHALLENGE14 to save 20% and so we know you are participating in the challenge.

Make sure you select TWO TESTS. The Home Kit Challenge costs $161 and the Fitness Challenge costs $242, which includes two tests, one to see where you stand in the beginning and the other to see how much you have improved at the end. 

You have until January 6th to get your blood tested with InsideTracker, and the sooner you do it the more time you have to optimize your health! The challenge ends on February 28th. At that point, you’ll have two weeks to get your blood tested a second time and compete for prizes. Winners will be announced in March.

For those that join the challenge, we’ll be doing a couple Google hang-outs with Tara Mardigan, the Boston Red Sox nutritionist, and Tara will answer your questions about optimizing your health and anything else you want to ask her.

We hope you’ll join us for this exciting New Year’s Challenge!

More info on Inside Tracker…

InsideTracker is a company that analyzes your blood and gives you the results in an online format that is easy to understand. They take your personal information like your age and how active you are and they give you ‘optimized zones’ so you know where your blood levels should be. InsideTracker then gives you specific nutrition and lifestyle recommendations based on science and a database of over 7,500 foods that help you improve your overall health.

How is this different from the blood test you get at your doctor?

For one, the results you get from your doctor are not personalized. So when your doctor says your levels are “normal,” that means your blood result falls somewhere within a wide range applicable to everyone age 18 to 64.

Also, when your doctor tests your blood, the goal is to find problems and indicators of disease. If they don’t find anything “wrong,” they’ll just tell you everything is normal.

InsideTracker, on the other hand, is trying to help you optimize your health by testing blood markers that are associated with mood, sleep, energy, and overall wellbeing. So, while your doctor is testing to make sure you aren’t sick, InsideTracker is testing to see if you are at your best – they want to help you get optimized through nutrition and lifestyle changes.

So who uses InsideTracker? Well, they have a lot of triathletes, marathoners, Olympians and even pro athletes who use their program, but many of their users are health-conscious everyday people who want to be healthy and fit. In fact, they are really trying to appeal to younger people and that’s why they approached me to do this challenge.

For questions, you can contact InsideTracker Support at fitchallenge@insidetracker.com.