My experience with 21 Day Fix Extreme!

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.