Name: The 12-week Fitness Project
Rating: 4.2 (254 reviews)
Author: Rujuta Diwekar

What’s in it for me? Health beyond weight loss: a fitness plan for lasting well-being

There are a lot of diet plans out there right now that promise fast results for a smaller waistline, from keto and paleo to intermittent fasting and juice cleanses. Still, most of the world’s population is getting bigger. That’s because eliminating food groups, as with paleo or juice cleanses, and restricting calories, as with intermittent fasting or calorie counting, come with huge downsides. These include poorer nutrition, and an increase in the body's natural response to calorie restriction: more hunger.

Many diets for weight loss compromise your bone density, muscle repair, and skin health — they might even affect your sleep. After all, it is easy to lose weight under extreme stress, but that isn’t fostering good long-term health and well-being – in fact, it’s doing more harm than good.

So if you’ve been looking to make lasting change in your overall fitness, this Blink is for you. To understand why sustainable change is so important, read on.

Why diets fail: the biology of starvation

During World War Two, starvation resulting from disrupted agricultural cultivation and supply chains was a near-global phenomenon. But the long-term effects of human starvation weren’t very well known. So in 1946 an American scientist, Ancel Keys, recruited healthy volunteers for a year-long study on the subject. The healthy young participants ate normally for the first three months, then for another six months they were restricted to just two meals a day to simulate starvation, along with required daily walks of several kilometers.

Within weeks of this restriction, the volunteers reported their energy levels plummeted, their muscles felt weak, and they were tired all the time. Mentally, they felt complete apathy, detached from the joys of everyday life, but were overwhelmingly obsessed with food. Even worse, they eventually thought of those around them as too fat, rather than themselves as too thin – a dysmorphia common to those with anorexia nervosa.

When the six months were over, they’d lost 25 percent of their body weight – but the long-term effects were just starting. Some participants reported that after the six months of restriction, they ate five times more than they had before. Given the study was published years later, in 1951, it also recounted how many had an increased appetite no matter how much they ate, even years later. Many participants described the study as the worst thing they’d ever experienced.

These brave participants highlighted the real costs of starvation, revealing how crash diets and poor nutrition are so damaging. From no energy or sex drive, they bottomed out, and their mental obsession with food during and after restriction set them up for continued misery.

That’s to say nothing of how far away this focus takes us from the nutritional advice we were given by our mothers and grandmothers. Traditional ways of eating a variety of foods from local sources, taking the time to enjoy them in peace and mindfulness, and enjoying the slow path to sustainable health can connect us to the land, to community, and to culture. Food can be a focus of celebration and joy, and feed us in more ways than one.

To counter the faster-is-better approach, let’s dive just a bit deeper into what sustainability means for health – not just our own, but the health of our communities and environment, too.

Be the tortoise, not the hare

Sustainable health must reject restrictive diets and embrace a holistic approach that doesn’t sacrifice health for some desired number on the scale. Sleep, activity, and food all play a role in overall well-being, and so fitness has to account for all three. Even more, any fitness plan has to be one that you can imagine following for life. One that you’d be happy to have your children or family to follow.

Yoga, for instance, isn’t simply getting into a pose by any means necessary, straining your muscles and joints. Think about sirsasana, or headstand pose, and how much alignment, strength, and coordination it takes to do the pose properly. Some may take a lifetime to perfect the pose, and they will derive all the benefits. They may even apply the lessons they learned from mastering a headstand to understanding many complex circumstances of life.

One by one, change adds up

The twelve-week fitness plan is based on cumulative progress. For each of the twelve weeks, you’ll embrace a single habit, and by week twelve you’ll be practicing them all. In week three, for instance, you’ll continue the changes from weeks one and two while adding in week three’s challenge. While you might be tempted to take them all on at once, this approach isn’t sustainable, and was much less successful for many of the author’s fitness-study participants.

If you find one week you’re not able to accomplish your goal, don’t stress. Just get back on track the following week and carry on. Skipping a week might seem huge in the short term, but in the long run, study participants who kept going after short lapses still saw enormous benefits after just twelve weeks, so this isn’t all-or-nothing.

More building blocks for change

By week six, your cumulative changes will be transitioning into real lifestyle change. It is incredibly important to keep going from here. That’s because week six focuses on adding one session of strength training to your week.

Adding lean muscle mass to your body, no matter your age, is one of the best predictors of a long, healthy life. As we get older, our muscle mass begins to dwindle, along with the strength and metabolic benefits we enjoyed in youth. Adding strength training counteracts this decline, and helps regulate our hormonal health.

When the project ends, the journey begins

When you’ve added all twelve building blocks to your health journey, the fun is just beginning. There are so many ways to keep modifying and adapting this fitness advice to help further your individual goals.

For instance, you can commit to trying a new fruit or vegetable every week. Eating in season and finding fresh, organic produce from local farmers is good for your body, and it brings variety to life. Growing produce in a backyard or terrace garden adds more activity and movement to your life, while helping you develop a deep personal connection with your food.

Key ideas in The 12-week Fitness Project