The Challenge is now over, but if you would like to do the Challenge on your own, just follow along with the week-by-week tasks. Links at the bottom of this article.

The bento challenge that I talked about previously here and here, will start on January 13th January 12th.

Why the 13th? Well, I think that at the start of the New Year, a lot of us are very busy with work or school, for ourselves or for our family, cranking up into full gear. So, the 13th seems like a good time to really start concentrating on ourselves and our habits. Since it will extend into February, I'm going to call it the Get Started Bento Challenge.

(Yes, I misread the calendar. As a few people have pointed out, Monday is the 12th. I had forgotten I'd recently changed my iCal settings so that the week starts on a Monday. Anyway, we'll be going quite slowly the first week, so let's say we'll be starting out on the 12/13th. Hope everyone is ok with that!)

The Get Started Bento Challenge

To get into the habit of making bento, and start 2009 off in a great healthy way!

The details

• The Get Started Bento Challenge will be for five weeks from January 12th to February 15th, with a specific task or challenge to work on every week.
• Participants will make a goal or a short list of goals they want to work on for themselves, whether it's just to get into a bento making routine, to use bento for healthier eating or to lose weight, to save money, and so on.
• We'll use a Flickr group, and a forum (location of forum to be announced!) to track our progress and share ideas. (I've read all of your comments so far and have taken into account all of your suggestions and concerns, and have decided that a combination of a Flickr group and a discussion forum would probably be the best.)

What do I need to participate?

• The first thing is to be sure you want to do this. Like anything that requires you to make changes to your daily routine, it will require some level of commitment on your part in order to be a success for you. If you are new to Just Bento, you may want to read through the Getting Started series.
• One basic thing you'll be asked to do is to take pictures of your bentos. So you should have some way of taking pictures of your bentos (they don't have to be beautiful, just visible!) and uploading them. I really think visual feedback is one of the best ways to really see what you are doing.
• You'll need at least one bento box before the 13th. Remember, your bento box does not have to be an 'authentic' Japanese bento box. Read the Selecting the right bento box article (and the linked articles in there). I'll be posting more about this as needed leading up to the Challenge start.

How do I sign up?

• Update: The forum is now open! If you haven't already, please register on the site in order to be able to post to the forum.
• If you are already a flickr member, please join the Just Bento group. If you're not yet a flickr member (it's free!) please join flickr and proceed. If for some reason you cannot use flickr, I can give you some limited tech support if you're a Mac user. (But really, it's very easy.) Otherwise, once the forum is up you'll be able to post photos there that are uploaded to other photo hosting services like Picasa, Photobucket, and so on.

Note: My last blog post of 2008 is over on Just Hungry, which may be of interest if you're setting goals and resolutions for yourself in the new year. Take a look!