The Healthy Giraffe is two years old! I have as much energy about this as I did when I started. What is this you may ask? I wrote the purpose of The Healthy Giraffe just over two years ago (crazy)…
The Purpose of The Healthy Giraffe is to provide resources, support and community in an effort to live a healthy lifestyle. Take personal accountability for your health – no one else will.
The tagline, Add Health to Your Life, can mean just about anything in the spirit of when we add and continue to add healthy things to our lives and we move less desirable things out. This can be nutrition, fitness, how we spend our time, etc. So if it’s going out to walk one day a week, one block, running a 5k, eating one more serving of fruit and/or veggies in a day, it’s about adding good (healthy) things to our lives, not missing what we think we are going to miss. It’s what it means to you.
I have learned so much on my journey from living an unhealthy life to living a pretty darn healthy lifestyle now. I have so many people to thank for that. You can see more how my life transpired on the page – My Story.
To support the purpose, my commitment was to write a blog, “The Giraffe Paper,” once a week. I am proud I have stuck to this internal mandate, not missing a single Monday deadline in two years, writing blogs spanning topics on nutrition, performance, the mind, our community and more.
It’s interesting looking at the website metrics and makes me feel good that some people either consider it meaningful or entertaining to visit and hopefully come back. Some pretty cools statistics for the first two years:
- Reached 45 countries in 2019, up from 30 in 2018 (50%). The biggest mover was the U.K. moving into the number 2 spot leaping Canada, up 564% in views! India also leaped Canada moving up to #3 with a 573% increase in views. Maybe the addition of my adopted giraffe, Randall, helped with viewership in South Africa as they were a new addition in 2019 and jumped all the way to #6 between Japan and Australia. The U.S., my country, has a firm hold to the #1 spot. Fun stuff…
- Visitors to the website increased 64% this year
- Views on the various pages rose 36% from last year
- The top five blogs of the 2019 measured in amount of views were:
Also in support of the purpose and power of community, when I started I wanted to organize a monthly event, “The Healthy Giraffe Event,” where we would either gather at my home or go on a road trip to a local restaurant offering plant-based options.
At the gatherings at my home we would usually watch a brief video on health, cook a healthy meal together (so much fun!!!), and then enjoy it. “Game Night” has been a fun addition to the events playing a game with a mix of learning on the theme of the night with fun random trivia. If you want to get a feel for one of the events, read my recap from the latest event, A Glorious Saturday Night Full of Life, hosted at Joel and Celia Dubey’s home. Thank goodness we had it there as we had 41 incredible people join on one fantastic night.
I wrote about each event covering what we experienced. You can type, “event,” as a search term in the box in the upper right of the page to go back and find previous event summaries.
I experimented with 30-Day Challenges including wall sits and planks. I’m curious for the interest in these going forward and have a few ideas for challenges including a few with nutrition.
In 2020, the purpose will remain the same. I will continue the weekly blog and monthly events. Please send me ideas on things you would like me to cover and where we should go in the Tampa Bay area to try out healthy plant-based cuisine. If you could take a 2-3 minutes sharing your ideas, I have created a very brief survey you can complete here.
Continuous learning is paramount to me. As I learn and share with you I hope to add value to your life and in some way – Add Health to Your Life. I know I have learned something from each and every person I have interacted with this year and it inspires me to continue on…
Thank you so much for an incredible two years!!!
Let’s keep this community building in a small way, big way, in your way –
– Add Health to Your Life
(Blog Featured Photo includes a photo from each of the 12 monthly Healthy Giraffe events)
The Healthy Giraffe 
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