Tuesday is the halfway point! Time to do some reflection. Boooooring, I know! A little reflection on how you’ve attacked the first two weeks of this challenge might help the second two weeks. I’m going to mostly address diet because I really haven’t heard many, if any, complaints on the water, sleep, getting in a half hour or exercise or mobility or having a fruit or veggie with every meal.
First, answer this for yourself: why did you choose to do the challenge? Are you trying to just change your eating habits and make healthier choices? Are you trying to change your eating habits and make some body composition changes? Are you trying to get “ripped?” Are you just a “challenger” and appreciate a little healthy competition to make you actually adjust what you’re doing? I’m sure there are many other possible reasons why you chose the challenge, but just take a second to identify the reason.
Second, answer this: how are you feeling after two weeks of making changes? No, don’t answer what the scale tells you or what your measurements tell you! How are you FEELING physically and mentally? How’s your energy? How’s your mental clarity? How is your sleeping?
Third: what changes did you make in the first two weeks? Are you substituting and replacing and just taking out the sugar ingredient and adding in a fruit, honey, agave, monk fruit (aka healthy sugar replacement) or are you actually removing that sweetness point from your diet? Same goes for gluten free and dairy free: are you just using a substitute gluten free version of pasta or dairy free cream cheese?
Final reflection questions: what do you want to get out of it? Are you getting those things out of it so far in these first two weeks?
I’m going to give you a little personal story from back around 2009/2010 when I joined my first CrossFit gym and did my first Paleo Challenge. I was fluffy at this point. I’d been active, but drinking beer, eating bagels with cream cheese for breakfast, having pizza every Friday, popcorn while cruising through the full series of Sopranos on DVD every weeknight, chocolate treats whenever I wanted (I’m a chocoholic), just not being that good to myself nutritionally. So I go into this Paleo Challenge at the gym assuming I will come out “ripped” like all the CrossFit females I see in the old school videos doing “Nasty Girls” and heading to what was the very beginning of the CrossFit Games. So my strategy became fruit ALL THE TIME! Fruit salad with breakfast, fruit salad with lunch, after dinner and anytime I wanted a snack. I did some major substituting instead of adopting some better habits. I think that fruit cured my chocoholism…wrong choice for my goal though. I made it through the challenge with no cheats, following all the rules and…I may have dropped a few pounds, but my abs were still protected by a nice layer of insulation and my body composition really hadn’t done much. I had lost water weight, that’s about it. Did I feel good and perform better? Absolutely, yes! But that wasn’t totally my goal at that point in my fitness road…I wanted to look the part. What did it take? More focus and making the right choices within the realm of Paleo/clean eating. And the leaner you get and want to get, the more focus and perfection you need. However, cleaning up my diet was the first step. Without knowing how to do that first, I could have never layered on what I needed in the future to get the body composition I wanted.
I lay that story out for you because I get the feeling that a lot of you are at a body composition crossroads and want to see changes. For many of you doing this challenge, you may be seeing that change happening before you very eyes. For others, you may not see those changes happening and it might be time to evaluate where you are in terms of body composition and how you have attacked the challenge so far. Those of you with more body fat to lose will see better results (in terms of numbers on the scale) than those that have less to lose. Those of you that have chosen to wean/eliminate certain foods and not just substitute will see better results than those who just “replace” the not so great goods with a little bit better foods. And I hate to say it, but the bottom line is men tend to react faster to dietary changes due to generally having more muscle mass than females and also due to not being of the childbearing gender. So, let me lay out another set of questions: Could you be attacking this challenge differently? Could you be challenging yourself more? Is it time to start weaning and stop replacing food items with the same type of substitute?
It’s not too late! No matter what, it’s not too late! Have you been getting 4’s and 5’s the whole time? Awesome, is there anything you can do better? Have you been getting 1’s and 2’s? Okay, get in gear! What do you need to do to succeed? Lets stop subbing chips without sugar for chips with sugar and agave nectar in your coffee for sugar (or at least bring the serving size of that down), stop trading gluten free pasta for regular pasta and coconut flour for regular flour. Choose homemade sweet potato fries, choose black (or blacker) coffee, choose spaghetti squash or zucchini noodles. Another whole topic of its own: ditch the alcohol. You get the point. Choose to be a little bit better each day. You’re coming up on two weeks left, you can handle 14 more days. There’s still time to do great things!