Last Week’s Choices

There’s one big mistake that people make with fitness, especially when they’re first starting on their journey. Let’s correct that once and for all.

Stand in front of the mirror in your underclothes.

What you see there has nothing to do with the things you ate or the exercise you did today.

When you look in the mirror, you are looking at last week's choices.

All of your fitness progress (or regression) is running on a one week delay. It takes a good five to seven days for diet and exercise changes to become visible at the surface level.

When you do a tough workout you ask your muscle fibers to do more work than they're prepared for. This damages the muscular cells and creates microtears in the fiber structure. You rest and the body repairs the cells, making them even stronger than before. This process takes about a week. 

When your body needs energy and there's not enough available (because you're eating lean and clean), it starts to break down triglyceride fat cells that are stored throughout the body. For enough of these fat stores to be depleted that you can see a visual difference takes about a week.

How did you eat last week? That's what's going to determine how you look today!

Be careful, the one week time lag works the other way as well!

If you don't stimulate your muscles through exercise, the body will stop maintaining of the muscle fibers and the energy devoted to maintaining muscle. This is muscle atrophy, and it's a complicated biochemical process that takes about a week.

If you're consuming more calories than you're using, the body will take that excess energy and pack it up into those triglyceride bundles which are then distributed throughout your body as fat deposits. This too is a convoluted chemical process that takes about a week before you can see visual changes in your fat levels.

This time lag messes with people's minds both on the way up the fitness ladder, and on the way down.

Last week's choices cast a trailing shadow over how you look and feel in the present moment.

Case 1

Someone starts a workout/diet routine. They work hard for a week, are feeling good about themselves, and then spend some time in front of the mirror. But the results are disappointing. They don't see big changes. Some places might even look worse than before (because the body is in the process of rebuilding itself). So they go a little less hard the next day, or eat that dessert because, "It doesn't seem to matter what I do, I'll always be out of shape." If they only went strong into the next week, they'd be able to see the results of their first week of hard work and be well on their way!

Case 2: 

Someone has gotten into pretty good shape. Their muscle mass is high and their body fat percentage is low. And then an event comes along, maybe a wedding, a holiday weekend, or a week's vacation. Quite reasonably, they go a little overboard, eating too much, drinking too much, enjoying themselves. They get back, check the old bathroom mirror, and what do you know, despite the lax week they're looking great! The fat is still low, the muscle is still popping, everything's as it should be. So when the next sweet treat or round of beers comes by they figure, "Hey, what the hell, I'm bulletproof!" and go for it. The workouts get skipped, the food control weakens, and they slowly start the slide back to being in poor shape.

You can see this one week delay stings both the fit and unfit alike. It's very egalitarian in that sense!

Once you know the one week concept, you can start to prepare for it. If you're just starting a program, know that you're going to be well into the second or third week before any big changes start to become visually apparent. Trust it and it'll come.

And if you have a lazy or indulgent week, know that the bill will come, just not for a week or so. When the due date arrives be ready by already having gotten back on track.

At the end of the day the best course of action is to not think about weekly progress at all, but to have a set period of time where you'll eat well and workout no matter what the mirror shows. This is the only way to get real results.

The key to success is having a plan that you do consistently over an extended period of time. Is there anything in our lives that this rule doesn't apply to? Believe it!