100 Days of Fitness
- 100 Days of Fitness: An Introduction
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 2 - Nutrition
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 3 - Exercise
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 4 - Building a Home Gym
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 5 - Supplements
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 6 - Expectations
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 7 - Footwear
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 8 - Food Lies
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 9 - Meet the Kettlebell
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 10 - Sample Circuits
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 11 - Days vs Weeks
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 12 – The Geography of Weight Loss
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 13 - Travel Training
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 14 – Meals, Snacks, & The Pocket Workout
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 15 - What It's All About
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 16 - Endless Push-Ups & Learning the Pull-Up
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 17 – Adjustable Kettlebells + A Circuit
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 18 – Intermittent Fasting & Strength Test
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 19 – 15 Minute Workouts & A Cool Workout iPhone App + Contest
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 20 - Switching It Up
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 21 – Reflections
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 22 – A Week Without a Workout
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 23 – Why We Work Out & The 30 lbs Lost Marker
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 24 - 5 Common Home Gym Mistakes
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 25 – Work Ethic
- 100 Days of Fitness Special: Men's Health in Movember
- 100 Days of Fitness: The Muscle Aesthetic
- 100 Days of Fitness: The Cure for Holiday Pounds
We've covered all the basics of the program, from the calendar to food to exercise and even supplements. You have the knowledge you need to successfully complete the 100 Days of Fitness challenge. All that's really left is to manage your expectations.
With any program, there are going to be ups and downs, highs and lows, great weeks and bad ones. It's your job to fight through these. The worst weeks are the ones where you feel you did everything right, but the scale disagrees. Thankfully, these are few and far between. If you look at your calendar and see you missed two or three days, you had a horrible week. Expect to see no fat loss. You really need to take this program seriously. When you get lazy, you start losing results. And I don't mean getting sedentary, I mean getting lazy on food choices. Letting too much sugar back in.
There will be a time when you can start eating carbs more frequently – once you hit your goal weight. Then you can work on maintaining. But a successful diet plan needs some momentum to keep you going. When you hit that wall and you start to cheat on your diet or skip workouts, every time you do that, it makes it a little harder to get back on the right path. Nothing motivates people like success.
As you'll see in my updates section, this was a rough week. I knew it was coming eventually, but I know to power through it and make next week a success. You need to do the same when you hit a snag – learn from it, change what went wrong, and get back on board.
Your expectations are important, but they're tied directly to what you put into this thing. You can't expect to lose 30 pounds because I told you. You have to expect to lose 30 pounds because you put in the hard work. Nothing on this program is all that hard, but nothing is free. I'm not telling you to workout four hours a day or cut your diet in half, but the rules are the rules. If you follow them, you can expect to succeed. If you don't, you're just gearing up for failure. And that's sad, because the only real way to fail at the 100 Days program is to quit the rules or quit altogether.
You've opted to walk this course for a reason – remember it. Whether it's seeing your abs or looking good in a swimsuit, remember that goal and remember that it's attainable. Stick with it.
My Results
As I foreshadowed, a bad week. My weight is still at 242.5lbs, a change of zero from last week. This is not unexpected though, as I had a terrible week with three missed days. I had an out of town guest come by and that translated to eating out and drinking. It was my choice, perhaps wrong, to enjoy myself with friends, and have burgers, fries, and beer – pretty big carb no-nos. So not losing any weight was to be expected. But there is a lesson to be learned here: when this program is over, you can live a normal life with the occasional indulgence and not gain weight. This isn't some magic trick. This is real weight loss. A secondary lesson which I expect to learn next week is that having late night dinner and drinks really messes with the scale. I'm assuming some of this is related to having carbs and food so late that when I weighed myself, I wasn't getting an accurate number. I'm expecting a big drop next week – and to make sure it happens, I'm going to take responsibility and make sure I have a great week, with lots of exercise and excellent food choices.