100 Days of Fitness: Week 11 – Days vs Weeks

The 100 Days program is pretty different than most programs in how it measures time.  The point of 100 DoF is to slowly get you to change your eating habits, for good, over time, and get you exercising on a daily basis.  Most other programs seem to want to punish you into weight loss by taking away your favorite foods and forcing you into unrealistic time tables.

I said at the beginning that this wasn't about hitting 100 days in a row – that's tough, if not impossible with holidays, birthdays, and life getting in the way. No one wants to be the guy that's made of fun of for bringing a tupperware container of chicken breast to a cookie party.

This program lets life happen, all the while keeping you on a long term track.  In an average week, your best bet is hitting six days out of seven because this gives you one day to relax and enjoy time with your friends without being a square.  Hey, if you can do seven out of seven days, you're awesome and you'll get results faster, and that's awesome.

It's important on the program to complete the full one hundred days.  When you make it, you'll have become so used to eating healthier and working out daily it will have become part of your routine, and since it isn't punishment based, you'll be more likely to want to continue.

When measuring your weight loss, it's also important to base it on the days not the weeks.  This is the eleventh week we've run a 100 Days of Fitness article, and if only weeks counted we'd almost be done.  One hundred days is fifteen weeks if you don't miss any.  But, since we allow off-days, we actually extend the number of weeks you're eating healthy and exercising.  Even just taking off one day a week means that instead of following the program for 15 weeks, you'll follow it for 17 weeks. Tricky, I know.

Personally, I've completed 46 days thus far, meaning I still have 54 more days to go before I've completed the program.  This means I'm coming up on the half-way point. My meal choices are a lot easier now – I've been turning down pasta and bread and chips so often, they don't enter into my mind as something I want to eat. Working out is just something I do almost every day, not something I have to think about and plan for.  For me, the plan is working and being healthier is becoming part of my life, not something I really have to work for, which is the ultimate goal. Speaking of goals…

My Results

This past week I doubled last weeks loss and shed two pounds bringing me down to 234lbs.  This gives me a total weight loss thus far of 17.5lbs. As I mentioned, I'm coming up on the half-way point of the program, so if I maintain my average loss the rest of the way, I should easily hit my initial goal of 30lbs and am currently on track for hitting closer to 35lbs.  Sounds good to me.