21-Day Fix, Week 1

So… the 21-Day Fix: it’s a lot harder than I expected!

To be honest with you, I had a bad first week. I blame the holidays.

A work happy hour on Thursday (we had early dismissal, so why not?) ruined that day. Friday, my boyfriend arranged a group outing to a beer hall, and Saturday we grilled on the roof. The grilling wouldn’t usually be that bad, but our friends were cooking, and then made grilled pizzas (so good!).

In my defense, I at least ran 12 miles on Friday and another 6 miles on Saturday? That’s above and beyond what the fix typically calls for in terms of exercise.

But let’s back up to the start of the week, when I actually stuck to the fix.

I spent a lot of Saturday and Sunday planning out my week, since my coach/friend Leah said that is pretty key. And let me tell you, that was hard!

I’ve never been one to plan out a meal plan. That’s usually okay, as it leaves me flexibility when my boyfriend unexpectedly has to work late and I’ll be eating alone. But it also means I’m usually at the grocery store 3-4 times a week. (Part of that is because I live in New York, and carrying home too many groceries isn’t fun.) Still, it was important to plan so I wasn’t left eating a bizarre assortment of food at dinner.

Monday through Wednesday I did a fantastic job at sticking to my meal plan. I spent time every night preparing my lunch box for the day ahead with my lunch plus + snacks. And each day, I woke up early, got in one of the 21-Day Fix videos (Upper Fix + 10 min. Abs, Lower Fix and Dirty 30) and had my Shakeology. Sure, I got hungry sometimes, but my will power stayed strong.

Thursday morning, I woke weighed myself and I was already down 0.8 lbs! I’m sure some of it was water weight from the weekend, but that’s still pretty good.

But here is the other hard part: those videos! I’m in pretty good shape. I run a lot, I do spin classes that have an arm segment and I do barre classes. But those videos? They destroyed me. Seriously. My abs and my glutes and hamstrings (Lunges? Squats? What are those?) were sore for days…walking funny sore. I most definitely did not expect that.

My abs were so sore that they ended up seizing up during my easy run on Thursday! It was like a Charlie horse…but with my abs. Ouch. And the same thing happened on Friday during my longer run! I had to stop a number of times to massage (/beat up my abs) so I could keep going. I decided to take a break from the videos Friday-Sunday to give my body a chance to recover.

And then, of course, my eating was terrible at the end of the week. I won’t go into the gory details, but it involved cake balls, a soft pretzel and too much beer.

But I tracked my calorie intake/output (thanks to MyFitnessPal and my FitBit Charge HR), and I think over the weekend I only consumed 600-800 calories more than I should have (thanks running!), but if you consider I was supposed to be maintaining a decent deficit, I was really over by a lot more than that.

This week, my goal is to refocus and to be good about sticking to it. No drinking and no cake balls!! Midway into the week, I’m holding strong, but we’ll see how things go as the weekend nears!