Week 7: Time for Serious Change

OK, friends, I am ready to accept it. It is time for serious change. Up to this point in the 80 Pounds in 80 Weeks challenge, I have focused on increasing exercise and making small changes to my food consumption, but this week I decided it is time to make some serious changes. While I feel stronger and a little healthier, I have barely budged the scale. In order to make a significant difference, I need to make serious changes to what I eat.

Diet and Weight Loss Programs

I began the week by investigating various diets and programs. While Weight Watchers is highly respected and I know numerous people who have experienced success with it, I have tried it a few times in the past without great success.  I love the idea behind having an allotted number of points each day and being able to choose how to use them; if a colleague offered me a doughnut, it just meant I had to give up the points elsewhere in my day.  It truly is a realistic approach to creating lifelong healthy eating habits. For whatever reason, though, I still struggled with it.  (Even though it didn’t work for me, I would recommend the program to others, and its track record speaks for itself.)

I quickly dismissed Jenny Craig and Nutrisystem because I have an issue with programs that require you to eat their food.  While I would really like a program that tells me exactly what to eat each day (in fact I often crave such direction), but if I am not required to do my own meal planning and cooking I don’t think I would be able to maintain any weight loss achieved.  For similar reasons, I did not seriously consider SlimFast for its use of simply replacing two meals with shakes and not training me to make good choices.

Pinterest to the Rescue

Still looking for a viable solution, I did what any modern woman would do and turned to Pinterest. I noticed a number of pins on clean eating, but it was a picture of the colorful containers that drew my attention to “The 21 Day Fix”.  This is a Beachbody program that includes seven intense workouts, but it also provides colored containers in different sizes tat help users determine appropriate portion sizes.  There is a green container for vegetables, purple for fruits, red for protein, yellow for carbs, etc., and depending on your current weight, the program helps you determine how many containers of each color you should consume each day. I found this system attractive because it provides more direction for me than Weight Watchers by indicating what type of food I should eat and exactly how much.  However it still provides the freedom to choose which vegetable, for example, to put in the various green containers for the day, while teaching me how to make those choices, leading to lasting healthy food choices.  By committing to the system for 21 days (the time it takes to create a habit), it is likely users will transfer those skills to regular daily life to maintain weight loss.

The 21 Day Fix – The Real Solution?

Now I can hear the wheels turning in some of your heads.  You are thinking if the original goal was to lose 80 pounds in 80 weeks, do I really think I can lose it in 21 days.  The answer is no.  While I would be ecstatic if that would be possible, I know lasting weight loss takes time, and I don’t see this program as a quick fix.  Instead, I am hoping it will be an encouraging jump start to help me develop positive food habits and to confirm my belief that it is actually possible to lose weight despite numerous failed previous attempts.  The 21 Day Fix also suggests users not only record their starting weight but numerous body measurements and “before” photos so you can measure results by more than just a scale. I think it will be encouraging to see in multiple ways how my body is being transformed throughout the process and not rely only on a scale to tell me whether or not I am being successful.

So, there you have it.  If you are on this journey with me, you can investigate the 21 Day Fix by visiting Beachbody.com (or Pinterest) and see if it looks like a good fit for you.  If not, consider focusing on portion sizes.  This is very basic, but a good goal to shoot for is to have 50% of your plate be vegetables/fruit, 25% lean protein, and 25% carbs.  Keep up the great work, and I’ll meet you back here next week.

 

 

What helps you make healthy food choices?