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You know what's a heck of a good workout? Moving. Bending and lifting boxes works just about every muscle -- arms, back, legs. Especially if you are moving to a second floor apartment.

What's that you say? You don't plan to relocate any time soon. Well, you're in luck! You can help me and Joe move this weekend. Having moved about a dozen boxes, bags and suitcases already, I can tell you it really tires you out!

OK, I admit it. I've been trying to put on a brave face for the other inhabitants of Cheesefry Nation, but I can't keep it up any more. I am discouraged.

I've read the labels, the books and the websites. I've done the gym thing. I've gotten good advice.

And still, the scale mocks: 189 pounds.

Seven pounds lost ain't bad. That's 3 percent of my original body weight. But it isn't exactly the Get Healthy Guilford goal of ten pounds lost. It isn't even near my personal, long-term goal of losing ten percent of my body weight, or about 20 pounds.

And unfortunately, I am slipping back into the old habits. Stress eating chocolate. Skipping the gym because of a late night at work (two already this week!) Eating out for convenience (it's easy to convince myself to buy lunch when half of my kitchen is packed up in boxes because of the move.)

Help! Someone cheer me on. I need a kick in the pants.

Week in review
Amanda
Exercise: 2 days : (
Weakest moment: Chinese take out - calling my name
Soda: none
Pounds lost last week: O
Weight: 189 lbs
Total pounds lost: 7 lbs

Joe
Exercise: 1 day
Weakest moment: Chinese take-out
Soda: none
Pounds lost last week: 1
Weight: 211
Total pounds lost: 8 lbs

Boss stopped by my desk the other day. He inspected my trash can for candy wrappers.

Can't say I didn't bring that one on myself.

I want to give a shout out to Chick-fil-A and OutBack for offering Coke Zero, the much tastier alternative to Diet Coke.

May that 1980s vintage era soda become a footnote in the annals of dieting history, between the Thighmaster and Richard Simmons shortie shorts.

Nine weeks ago Amanda and I began the Get Healthy Guilford Challenge to eat more fruits and vegetables, exercise more and, hopefully, lose ten pounds in ten weeks.

We began a blog called Cheesefry Nation to share our progress (or lack thereof). It's been excerpted in the News & Record's Life section, which has added print readers to the online folks who've been giving us tips, encouragement and the occasional scolding.

With one week to go I'm at 210 pounds - one pound from being ten pounds lighter. I've lost about two inches off of my waist and am back in the pants and suits that were fitting too snugly before. I'm feeling better, sleeping better and looking better.

But I've decided that when the ten weeks is up, whether I'm ten pounds down or not, I'm going to keep it going. I'm going to try to lose another ten pounds in ten weeks. Because I can, I should and what made this ten pounds hard (to the degree it was hard) was trying to change bad habits I'd accumulated over the course of many years (too much fast food, soda instead of juice or water, eating too much meat and not enough everything else, eating in front of the TV). I haven't completely licked all of those - though I do have the soda monkey off my back at long last. But I've licked enough of them that I think the next ten pounds would come much easier. That would put me down to what I think was my best all time weight -- around 200 lbs, much of it muscle. Getting that muscle back will be a major part of my next ten pound leg of this thing -- and I think it can be done.

Week in review
Joe
Exercise: No days at the gym, but lots of apartment moving and some push up, sit ups.
Weakest moment: Ate out a number of times as we packed up our kitchen.
Soda: none
Pounds lost last week: 2
Weight: 210 lbs.
Total pounds lost: 9 lbs.

Amanda
Exercise: 1 day at the gym, three days moving apartment stuff (great cardio)
Weakest moment: Not a lot of snacking (snacks packed up), but milkshakes...oh, the milkshakes.
Soda: none
Pounds lost last week: O
Weight: 189 lbs
Total pounds lost: 7 lbs

...piling a bunch of moving boxes in front of the fridge. You can't snack if you can't get to the food.

Granted, the mess was only temporary. But it was affective.

In the future, I am going to put the cookies on the shelf I can only reach with a chair.

So last night Joe and I ate at home for the first time in, oh, probably ten days. It was the first time in more than a week we have had both food and cooking stuff (cutlery, dishes, pots, pans) in our kitchen and not stuffed in moving boxes.

I'll blame this nomadic existance for my total lack of recent progress. I'm guessing I'm not the only one.

When I checked in with Get Healthy Guilford Director Leslie Armeniox today -- at the beginning of the final week of the ten-week weight loss challenge -- I realized I am full of practiced excuses.

But she gave me some good advice.

"If you mess up, just let it go. It's a relapse. Just get back on your program. Try not to get caught up in feeling bad," she said.

Now that we have unpacked and settled, it's also time to recommit and brush off the set backs.

And if you are one of those 500 people who joined up with Get Healthy Guilford nine weeks ago, and you are bummed that you haven't lost nine pounds yet, chin up. Leslie says get with the program.

No more excuses.

FYI....Get Healthy Guilford is going to wrap up its ten-week weight loss challenge with a celebration from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. May 10 at Burmill Park.

There'll be guided trail walks and nutrition tips and other fun stuff, so make sure you stop by.

Final Week in Review
Joe Killian
Exercise: No days at the gym, but lots of apartment moving and some push-ups and sit-ups.
Weakest moment: Ate out a number of times as we packed up our kitchen.
Soda: none
Pounds lost last week: 2
Weight: 209 pounds
Total pounds lost: 10 pounds

Amanda Lehmert
Exercise: four days, including one lovely spring afternoon walk
Weakest moment: snuck a Snickers
Soda: none
Pounds lost last week: 1
Weight: 188 pounds
Total pounds lost: 8 pounds

So, that's it for the Get Healthy Guilford Challenge. But we're not done yet.

Both Amanda and I want to keep this thing going and challenge ourselves to lose another ten pounds in ten weeks.

Admittedly, we're not off to a great start (I had late night McDonalds last night after skipping dinner and brought her a milk shake) -- but we know it can be done now, and we have a good idea how to do it.

We wrote some wrap up essays for the News & Record's Life section Monday. You can read them after the jump.

Reader Diana writes to us about being bored with all the water in her weight loss regimen:

I have been following your and Amanda's weight loss success. In your comments on 4/14 I am quoting from your article..."too much fast food, soda instead of juice or water"... What kind of juice(s) do you drink? I often drink water with my meals but get tired of it sometimes and would like something different.

Here's my reply:

Thanks for writing to us, Diana.

I’ve been told that there’s danger in replacing soda with juices because there’s a lot of sugar in 100% juice – but there are also a lot of vitamins, and the sugar isn’t refined. I don’t drink as much juice as I used to drink soda, but I do like to have a glass of orange juice (not from concentrate – Amanda picks on me for caring about the difference) with breakfast. One eight ounce glass of orange juice (it’s easy to overdo it) is 2 servings of fruit – so you’re well on your way to your recommended daily servings in the morning.

I also enjoy cranberry juice – though what you’ll usually find in the grocery store is a mix of cranberry and apple juice. Amanda used to live and work on Cape Cod, where cranberry bogs are huge and she’s explained to me that pure cranberry juice is just too strong for most people. But if you’re going to go the cranberry route, make sure that you get something that’s 100% juice and not one of the cranberry juice cocktail drinks they’re peddling that have something like 10% juice.

The people who make V8 also make V8 Fusion(http://www.v8juice.com/fusion.aspx), a blend of fruit and vegetable juices that is actually good – as opposed to the straight V8, which Amanda learned she didn’t like the hard way. But they also make V8 Splash, a drink that is delicious but not 100% juice.

There are also a number of great diet juice and tea mixes that you can make at home. I like the Target brand ones myself – they make a peach iced tea I could drink all day that I think is something like 5 calories per serving.

What are you guys drinking?

Well, Amanda and I are back from our vacation to Arizona and we're recommitting ourselves to eating healthy, working out and taking off ten more pounds in ten weeks.

The Get Healthy Guilford challenge has officially ended -- but Amanda lost 8 lbs and I lost 11, so we know we can do this.

We won't talk about how much we ate and how little we exercised over the vacation -- suffice to say that this weekend, before we returned to work and began the new week, we found ourselves sharing a plate of cheesefries with some friends.This may become a new tradition -- reach one goal, clog your arteries with salty, bacony, cheesy arterial death and then face down the next challenge.

Those of you who also took the challenge -- how'd you do and are you keeping it going?

Hola, cheesefry nationals!

Sorry for the brief hiatus, but Joe and I have been traveling the great Southwestern United States. And as many of you are going to discover over the next few months, vacations are murder on your diet plans.

We bravely planned to exercise every day at our hotel's gym in order to make up for the fact that we would be eating out a lot. Jet lag and a busy schedule of fun nixed that plan. I imagine that walking around on one of several shopping excursions counts as exercise. But walking between the pool and the snack bar sort of cancel each other out.

We did -- however -- do some things right. We stayed on the third floor and took the stairs up and down every day. We gave plenty of piggy-back rides to my little niece and nephew (great resistance training on the fly.) And we shared a gargantuan slice of Cheesecake Factory cheesecake, evenly splitting the 40-grams of fat in each slice.

So we won't feel too bad about our vacation indulgences. After all, we passed on a chance to eat a chocolate-covered Twinkie.

Since we began the Cheesefry Nation blog I've gotten more e-mails about drinks - water, soda, diet soda, juice -- than anything else.

Water's clearly the best choice -- but sometimes it's not a lot of fun for your taste buds. Amanda and I have found a few diet sodas we like -- but not many. And while they're certainly the lesser of two evils, many doctors and nutritionists will tell you diet sodas aren't that much better for you and have even been linked to weight gain and chronic disease.

But here's the thing: water, soda and diet soda aren't your only choices.

Try some Green Tea -- which I've been drinking the last few days in the form of this fine product from the Arizona tea company:

Arizona Diet Green Tea with Ginseng. First ingredient: Premium Brewed Green Tea using filtered water. That, some natural flavors, Vitamin C, citric acid and honey, Splenda (which I much prefer to aspartame) and Ginseng extract. No calories, no carbs, one gram of sugar and 10 grams of sodium per serving.

All of which would mean nothing if it didn't taste good. And it does. It's not water, but it's a step above diet sodas.

Here's what Dr. Mehmet Oz (author of the excellent You: The Owner's Manual) has to say on the subject:

"It may have only one-third the caffeine of coffee, but because it has extra natural chemicals in it, it gives you the same punch. Green tea is unfermented tea that hasn't been oxidized yet, so whatever biologically active, natural goodness was in the plant is still in there."

I'm going to begin making the tea at home (to further avoid any of the extra stuff) and see how it goes.

I also have to recommend the Arizona Diet Peach Tea, sweetened with real fruit juice with no preservatives, artificial colors or flavors. Good stuff.

What are you guys drinking?

I think I've mentioned the book You: The Owner's Manual on the blog a few times now.

It's been a huge bestseller and I recommend it to anyone interested in a clear, concise and often humorous explanation of how our bodies work and simple ways to make them work better.

One of the book's authors, Dr. Mehmet Oz, will be on Discovery Health tonight with two back-to-back shows. The first (9 p.m. ET) based on his book You: Staying Young and the second You: The Owner's Manual (10 p.m. ET).

Dr. Oz has been a regular on Oprah for a while and is always witty and informative. I'll be watching him tonight - you should too.