Summary of our 12 habits in 21 days mission

These last 21 days we did not feel like we're on a mission. We did not feel like we are doing a challenge as well. Maybe that is why we couldn’t lose more than a kilogram during the last three weeks. On the other hand we must say – we did adopt a few of the habits we wanted to. Although we struggle sometimes we mostly do not eat after 8 pm. We exercise almost daily (or at least we feel guilty when we don’t), we start our day almost every morning with a smoothie and we haven’t eaten meat since maybe a month. We eat now mainly vegan, sometimes fish and a few times cheesy and eggy stuff.

Slowly but surely we'll get to our goal.

We just need to step it up a notch. But now that we have at least 4 habits down – we can easily focus on the ones we have most problems with – small portions and no more seconds. These two will make the difference for weight and fat loss. They’re our Everests! Of course it’s also important what we're eating. But considering we haven’t bought a chocolate from a store anymore and am eating mostly vegetables, nuts, grains and legumes, we think it’s safe to say we're on the right path.

Let’s summarize our experience with the habit formation these last 21 days one by one.

1. No more coffee.

NOOOOT. If you’ve read our previous posts you’d know well we broke this rule more than once.

Which is a lot, given we were on this mission only 21 days. The good thing is though – we can have coffee one day and then the next day we don’t even miss it.

2. Have a smoothie in the morning.

We're proud to say we're doing great with this one – we're experimenting with different fruits, vegetables and just having some fun with it.

Contrary to coffee smoothies do give us more energy and wake us up in the morning. Coffee, if anything at all, makes our heart race like a trillion horses, makes us nervous, acidifies and dehydrates our body, all in all – we feel like horse crap. None of this happens with a good smoothie – we feel wide awake, hydrated and with an uplifted spirit.

3. Have 5-6 small portions a day. Make 2 of them a smoothie/salad.

We can honestly say we do have 6 portions a day. BUT! They’re far from small. We can just never leave the table /or wherever we're eating hungry. That’s just not us. That’s not how we've been raised – eat everything you have on your plate is the rule in life. And if you have more – get a second serving. That’s the extension of the rule. 2 of them for sure are smoothies though. But that does not change the fact that all the other ones are big big portions.

Because we don’t feel like having a fat stomach is us – we'll have to try a lot harder to make it with this rule. We feel like it’s the missing piece of the puzzle for our success to shape up and look a reliable we can.

4. No more seconds.

Well read number 3 – same thing.

5. Drink a lot of water.

We're so thirsty right now, writing! But somehow too lazy to get our ass up to go and get the bottle of water. Hell we're too lazy to put on our pyjama right now.

But during the last 3 weeks we have actually been drinking lots of water – plain, in smoothies and because it’s cold also in teas. Don’t ask us how often we've been peeing per day.

But hydration is muy important – so better drinking and peeing, than not peeing and a lot better than drinking your pee.

6. Eat until 8 pm.

We've actually succeeded as far as we could with this habit – we have not been eating or drinking anything besides water/tea after 8 pm these last weeks (Well except yesterday, when we were eating peanut butter directly out of the jar). But to every habit there’s an exception, and this habit is not an exception of the rule…Confusiiiing. What we mean is – whenever we went out in the evening, we couldn’t only drink tea or water. A drank a few beers (like a real young feminine lady) and sometimes we even ate at one Chinese place, but a small portion of dumplings and fried rice. So what? And it was practically on the next day in the morning at 3 am, so this does not count. Okay. It counts. We broke also this rule. A few times. Big times.

7. Mix it up: 2 days vegan, 2 days fish, the rest of the week – vegetarian

All the other diet rules would be useless if we were only eating in McDonalds. We tried to keep our food home-made and change it up a lot. That’s one of the basics – giving your body access to all kinds of good nutrients. From the fatties, the proteins, the phytochemicals, the vitamins…When they actually work together – they have added effects. That’s why, like in sports and other areas in life for that matter – it’s important to change it up. Adaptation is important to make habits and become an expert in one field, but diversity is key to growing, to challenging yourself. And diversity will always get you to success – whether it’s food, sports, a job…you name it. Don’t get too comfortable at a place where you don’t feel complete. And thankfully most of us have this something called – getting bored – it’s a protective mechanism against staying at a shitty job, eating only one thing and spending three hours in a gym daily to not lose a gram of fat in the end. Okay, we're not sure whether it’s a protective mechanism, but it sounds logical.

So yeah – we mixed it all up. We did most days vegan, 2-3 days vegetarian and 2-3 days fishy. We did not eat meat during those three weeks, and we can honestly for the first time of our life say we don’t actually miss meat, we don’t crave it even one tiny bit. That’s a lot – coming from a person who devoured half a chicken per day in her teenage years. And almost all through her twenties.

8. Exercise daily.

This is the habit that we love most. We can with a hand on our heart say – we love sports. We just love the way sport makes us feel – not only that it keeps us motivated, happy and we'd like to think in a few months lean – it also gives us power and confidence. The confidence to think we're invincible (even though we're probably not, after all we did lose a few arm wrestling battles – by the way, we're a girl, in case you get confused somewhere between the beer drinking and the arm wrestling) and we can do everything we put our mind to, we can do the impossible. We are not Number 4. We are Goethe. If he was an athlete of course.

Sports do make us feel more alive and exercising actually makes us want to eat less, and when we get hungry, we're hungry for the good stuff. For fresh vegetables, fish, legumes…And because these make us feel lighter, we feel like we can achieve more in sports, so that motivates us to try harder and to work out more often. Like we said – it’s a circle.

Needless to say that despite all our love for sports – we did not exercise daily. But we were exercising at least 4 times a week, which is also a good result and we achieved our goal that far – to turn sports into a habit. Now we can’t go a day without it.

9. Wake up early.

Still working on this one. We're always setting our alarm for 7am and have to listen to “Can’t touch this” by MC Hammer, which is not only our ringtone, but also alarm tone, all the way from 7 until 8 am – when we finally decide it’s time to get it together and get up. We guess we're a little bit of a night person. Exhibit A – we don’t know if it’s the coffee we had at 8 pm, but right now it’s 1:34, we're wide awake and we can’t stop writing. So it’s gonna be hard, and not that healthy to wake up at 7 am in the morning. Also if you don’t sleep enough – you cannot lose weight. So we would just have to change that – try to go earlier to sleep. If we only knew how.

10. Find time to do everything you want – don’t postpone things.

We completely forgot this rule even existed. We often write things quickly and don’t register them in our mind. However we think we have not been postponing things that much. Even though, we still haven’t sent one urgent letter. But can you blame us – the pigeon hasn’t visited us for a long time at our window. How am we supposed to send the letter?

11. Stop with the smartphone addiction.

What we also often do when we go out is that we leave our phone at home – whoever wanted to see us has already called us or wrote us. It’s so much better to be in the moment and to actually give the people you’re hanging out with the appreciation and respect they deserve. Everyone has done it, and it’s so disrespectful to be with someone and only stare at your phone like you actually don’t want to be there. Seriously stop it. Maybe just stop the internet connection though, so you can still make some pictures for good memories and call if you need to.

12. Write here every day.

Well you know how that went – we have been posting here pretty often. But not daily, so glass is half-full. Sometimes we're either tired, or we don’t know what to say, or we have planned it, but don’t have time and need to take care of other things at the moment.

But we think we've been posting here at least 3 times per week, which is the minimum we wanted to do. We will step it up a notch and we will also give you more interesting topics and pizza toppings to read about here. Good content needs time and practice though. So in the words of Take That – have a little patience.

So that’s it. Those were all of the rules and we know we did not do solid and while we have some feelings of guilt and dissatisfaction – we're still proud of myself. We could at least cover the basic habits and we know where our weaknesses are, so we can work on them.

We've in fact picked up another habit unintentionally – we now grab our camera every time we eat something. That’s so weird and funny – like someone brainwashed us. We just have to take a picture of everything we eat. We did find out that a photographic food diary is helpful – you get to see how much you are actually eating, you see all the weaknesses in your diet and once you see those weaknesses it’s up to you to change them.