As promised, here is my review of 21 Day Fix Extreme. Some
of you may be familiar with the basics: portion controlled eating in
color-coded boxes to measure servings so you aren’t counting calories all day,
calculated based on your weight, caloric needs, and whether you are trying to
lose weight or maintain your current weight, then you are working out 30
minutes a day for 3 weeks. I’m not going to go into that part in detail so if
you want to know more about that aspect, please feel free to ask!
I want to talk about the workouts themselves and just how it
went overall. My goal in doing 21DFX was to maintain my weight and get stronger
and more defined. The workouts are MUCH harder than the original 21 Day Fix, so
“Extreme” is apt. The workouts are fast-paced but Autumn always shows you
exactly what the move is before you do it and there’s a modifier to follow if
it’s too much. I have a hard time watching a move and repeating it without this
kind of break-down so the format is really great for me. You get much less of a
break between moves than in the original but it’s enough time to grab a sip of
water and get back at it. In almost every workout, except maybe yoga day, you
are working multiple muscle groups at all times (mixing lunges with rows,
squats and bicep curls, etc.) The Pilates day has you wrapped up in an exercise
band to make the moves more challenging, but thus more effective. That was one
of the only parts I had a hard time with: I had to push pause to get my band
situated (or get my 5 year old to pause/push play since I couldn’t do that at
the same time as getting my band wrapped around my feet correctly!) During the
workouts you’re encouraged to take a moment to shake it out if you need to and
get back in, and some of the people in the dvd occasionally can’t finish their
sets without taking a break. I found this really encouraging. These are real
people doing the moves and it is hard. There’s no pretense about it. Autumn
shows the moves, gets everyone started, then walks around correcting form and
that is really helpful too if I find that I’m not lunging low enough or holding
my back straight enough. She also describes very clearly what muscles you are working,
which helped me focus. The hardest move of all for me out of the lot was doing
push-ups while holding weights, then between push-ups doing a row. Also I
couldn’t do all the yoga moves fully and had to follow the modifier on quite a
few of the poses but I still got a lot out of it and actually improved
dramatically in just 3 weeks. I loved the challenge.
The only other part that was hard was eating enough
food. I had to eat A LOT on this plan in order to not lose weight and I’d often
have a few containers left at the end of the day because I simply wasn’t
hungry. My allotment of servings a day was 5 veg, 3 fruit, 5 protein, 4 carb, one
each healthy fat/cheese and seeds/oil, and 5 teaspoons of seed or nut butter or
more oil.
My experience got a little complicated when on what would
have been the first day of my last week, I got really sick with a stomach virus.
It was over pretty fast but over the course of 48 hours all I had to eat was
one piece of toast, a few veggies and crackers, and lots of Gatorade and I lost
3 pounds. On the third day I just ate whatever sounded good to my weak system
to put the weight back on, and then went back on the 21DFX plan and resumed my
workouts, finishing the full 7 days from that point.
I achieved my goal of toning up, rather than losing weight,
but I could pretty much guarantee if you were eating to lose weight on this
program it would start melting right off. It is not a program for just getting
back into fitness though. I occasionally found myself telling myself, “You ran
a half-marathon. You can do this for 30 more seconds!” It’s that intense. You’re
also supposed to take a week off before starting it over. This week is my week
off so I’m planning on doing PiYo a couple days this week and then thinking
about what my next move is: repeat 21DFX or just incorporate some of the
workouts and get back to running on other days.
My results aren't super-dramatic because I was in a fit place to begin with but you can see for yourself below what just 3 weeks did for me. I'll have more "after" pictures up on my coach site soon.
