12 habits in 12 days mission

So this pic is the screensaver on our phone. And we didn’t put it because we're a pervert, like our friends suggested, but because we need an inspiration to get in shape. It’s a pic of Bar Refaeli, not of our majesty like we told our mom at Christmas. And she believed us right away. God bless her, we love her.

So at our next beach vacation we want to look body-wise like a shorter version of Bar Refaeli. We're not going to upload a picture of us in bikini from our last vacation. But we were too chubby for our taste. We even saw in some pictures we have cellulite. And no. Not on our legs. That’s pretty normal. Every woman has that. ON MY ARMS! But, the good thing about this is that those pics will be great in an inspiring before and after picture a few months from now. So yay! Glass is half-full guys.

Ok we'll show you one picture from our last vacation.

This is our foot. And no it’s not a small fat one, but that’s some giant shell. Unfortunately we didn’t try selling it on ebay for a gazillion dollar baby. We just left it there.

So to lose this cellulite and the fat belly, that we should only have if we're pregnant, or we're a baby myself, we've started a mission yesterday. A lot of people make clean eating challenges, exercise challenges, drinking something with cayenne pepper challenges, taking diarrhea pills challenges for like 30 days with the expectation of achieving their dream body. These challenges are now everywhere. And like all diets they work for some people, and for other people not that quickly.

So we're going to do our “challenge” a little differently. First of all it won’t be a challenge, we're gonna call it a mission. We're not challenging myself to do something. We're just gonna commit to it and do it. Slowly but surely. And that’s the key. To not put yourself too much under pressure and get obsessed with losing weight. You have to define your goal. And to want it. Not because of somebody else, but because of you. Because like L’Oreal said:You’re worth it. We feel like Jennifer Lopez now. Is she still doing that commercial?

And our goal is: to have a toned body, for the first time in our life – abs, be vital, confident, happy and to always live in the moment.

We know we're not going to achieve all those things in 21 days and just check them off our list. We want to achieve them and then maintain them. There’s no fast fix for anything that’s worth having.

We'll give myself 21 days not to fulfill our goal, but to implement the habits that we need in order to achieve our goal.

Maybe we won’t get all of them day one (and we can tell you yesterday we didn’t), but we have to try. And the next day as well. The point is not to make a challenge and then return to old patterns. The point is to know that these challenges are there to make you pick up some habits that will help you achieve your goal long term.

Once you make something good a routine, don’t drop it because of someone/ or something else. We’ve all been there – whether it’s a new job, a new boyfriend, a new friend – we make sacrifices for those things/people. For example if we know that we’re having an event in a few weeks and there are still millions of things to work on, we would just buy a fat burger, a cupcake and a latte macchiato and sit in front of the computer for 15 hours. Without water and without going to pee. Instead we have to find a balance. Do our best at work, while still eating healthy and going to the gym.

So given the goal that we have: Bar Refaeli’s body in short with all the happiness and vitality stuff we've defined 12 habits that we want to implement the next 21 days.

1. No more coffee.

Some say coffee is healthy, some say it’s not. Some say the health benefits of coffee start after the 6th cup. Good luck with that. What we know for sure from our experience is that coffee dehydrates our body, is too bitter for us without a load of sugar and milk, makes our skin break out and is the most addictive thing we've ever had to deal with in our life. We mean it could not be a good thing to have strong headaches on days when you don’t drink it. So this year we're doing pretty good with that. We haven’t had a single cup of coffee. And we don’t even miss it. We've been trying to quit it for one or two years. It didn’t have the pick-up effect on us that everyone claims it has. We could drink it and then go to sleep right away. But if we drank two cups we were starting to feel worried and nervous. We're thankful and happy we could get off of it and we're gonna keep it away from us even longer.

2. Have a smoothie in the morning.

Well before we quit coffee we didn’t have any breakfast. We would drink 2 cups of cappuccino or latte macchiato with a lot of sugar until lunch and we would be good. Then we didn’t have any fruits and almost no veggies. So what we've been doing instead since the beginning of the year was either drinking tea or making a smoothie that looks like Shrek in the morning. It’s refreshing, full of fruits and vegetables and we get more vitamin C in the morning than we would’ve in one week prior to quitting coffee. Also it hydrates our body and we can decide if we're that hungry in the morning or not. Now we know, that we don’t need to eat 8 pancakes for breakfast. A smoothie also does the trick.

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

We're struggling with this one. And we guess we'll keep struggling. We're used to having coffee/no breakfast and then a big meal for lunch and a big meal for dinner. Mostly that makes us overeat and gives us stomach pains. Eating more often every 2-3 hours is supposed to speed up your metabolism. We have no experience with that, but the thing for us is that we do our exercises in the evening. So if we have a heavy lunch we can’t move in the evening. So we simply don’t go to the gym. Instead sit at home and eat something. Or on the days, when we're not anti social we would go eat out with other homo sapiens. Either way – not exercising. Today we've done good, had 4 small portions up till now and am going to pilates.

4. No more seconds.

That’s a tough one too. When we love our food we can’t stop with one plate. Even if we're not hungry anymore we'd go for a second. This is of course another reason for overeating and then getting cellulite on our arms. And when’s the right time to stop: when you’re still a little hungry. We'll work on that probably the hardest.

5. Drink a lot of water.

We won’t even say why, without water we’d be dead within a week. Water is the main component of the human body so you do the math. Once our friend told us she hates water. All we thought was: this is sick. She only liked sweetened drinks and was of course a heavy weight. So drink WATER.

6. Eat until 8 pm.

This one has to become a habit. Remember how Cinderella becomes a pumpkin after midnight? Well we become a hungry obese guy stuffing his face with all the worst foods he can find in his home after 8 pm. Except we're a girl, so a hungry obese girl. On the days when we're not that anti social and actually go out, we eat the worst things with other homo sapiens (we have a rule against ordering a salad in a restaurant). So to quit eating 1/2 a peanut butter jar every night we'll try to stick to this rule.

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

We get bored pretty simple if we have everyday the same thing. It’s okay with the smoothie – we can change them all the time, there are so many variations – green, red, orange…Satisfying little vitamin bombs. But if we have to eat a steak with broccoli every day we'd go crazy. Okay we will eat veggies, we love them. And we need to have some legumes as well. We need yoghurt. We need fish. We'll actually try to not eat meat these 21 days. And no refined sugar. Just desserts made from natural products. So having a day for everything is a good thing – you eat more diverse and you get all the good stuff from all over the food world.

8. Exercise daily.

No we won’t run 10 km, or do 30 min HIIT every day. We're not crazy. But same as food – we'll mix it up. One day we'll do pilates, one day aerobics, maybe a little bit of HIIT. Pilates actually is great for every day, but for us it’s kinda boring. But we need to do it to improve our horrible posture. Even if someone has the most insanely proportionate body, if that person has our awful posture then he/she’s screwed. A bad posture makes you 10x more unattractive. Plus we're sitting all day long. We need to move.

9. Wake up early.

This is sooo hard. Probably because we stay up until 2 in the morning we can not wake up at 7. We're always late. With everything. But the earlier we wake up – the more time we'll have to do the things we want during the day. And time is everything. If you did not know that until now, now you know it. And Lucy will confirm.

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

This is also one of our big weaknesses – we always find excuses not to work out, not to accomplish all of our tasks at work today. For everything. Even for the things that we want to do. We guess living in Germany made us like this. People here take it simple – with work, with sports, with food. Not saying you have to be drastic. But you have to have some discipline. And set some higher goals than training once a week. We'll work hard on this one.

11. Stop with the smartphone addiction.

The whole time we're on our smart phone. We haven’t even used our computer for a long time. And if you ask us what we're doing on this phone, we don’t have an answer. Except for: Not much. But it’s just addictive. And it consumes a lot of our precious time. But this year it’s gotten a lot better and we'll try to minimize it even more.

12. Write here every day.

See this one is also a big challenge for us. We said on Thursday we will start with the challenge last Friday and wanted to write here on Friday again, but we came to this just now. It needs to get into our routine – then it’ll come easily. Otherwise this mission will crash and burn. But we won’t let it get that far.

So those are the habits we'll work on the next 3 weeks. Wish us luck and answer us this question: What in the world is this?

Not homo sapiens, we're telling you.