How Heavy Metal and a bag of M&M’s inspired my latest experiment

30-days challenges

Have you ever participated in a 30-days challenge? E.g. food or fitness related challenges where you don’t drink alcohol for a month, or where you perform 1 workout a day (mostly the same movements every day)?

How did you feel? Before / during / after the challenge? What did you do after this month?

I experiment quite a lot with implementing new positive habits or routines and have also participated in these type of challenges. I truly believe that it is a great way to try new things, but my main concern are the lack of long-lasting results. How many people have started a very strict diet, which they held on to for one or several months? How many of them have lost a lot of weight, but regained it even faster (mostly with some additional kilograms) as soon as they went back to their old patterns? Old habits are hard to change! Frustrating, isn’t it?

Mindset – Motivation – Fun

Having the right mindset and the will to change your lifestyle is far more important! Along the way, you will also want to see results in order to keep motivated. In general most people won’t have much fun while on a very strict diet or exercise program. My advice if you’re on some sort of program: if you love it, stick to it. But if you are struggling and want to improve consistently with long-lasting results, whilst enjoying the process, please read my newest experiment below.

What inspired me for this post (and title), was the number 66 (or even 66,6%).

Some (fun) facts about this number:

• Today, May 1st, the Belgian radio-station Studio Brussel traditionally plays “De Zwaarste Lijst”, which consists of exactly 66 heavy metal songs, presented by comedian and musician Alex Agnew.
• Iron Maiden’s “The number of the beast” will most probably reach the top 10 again in this list, and will hopefully end up higher than its 9th position last year.
• If you put all Roman numbers below M (1000) behind each other from high to low, you’ll get DCLXVI (666)
• 66% of all Belgians older than 18y are regularly practicing sports, according to a study from FISA last year.
• The first Apple computer was sold at $ 666,66
• I am exactly halfway 66y old…

Since a few years, I am focusing on a healthy lifestyle, which combines good nutrition and exercise with having great fun. I don’t like to be the guy who says: “Oh sorry, I can’t eat that pie…” My sincere respect to all people who can (or really need to) do that every single time. We all know quite some people that are allergic or intolerant to certain food groups. But I would rather try to find a good balance without overthinking too much. This is where the percentage 66,6% pops in.

Define YOUR own goals

Similar to the pareto principle (80/20 rule), I’m aiming to follow my good habits AT LEAST 66,6% of the time. Everything above that is a plus! I love this approach since you don’t get frustrated if you aim for 80% and you don’t reach that target. To give you an example: most diets include one cheat day a week. I tried one of these methods and it brought me great results. On the other hand, it was hard to maintain all the time without having to deny too much, like pizza. Same for evening snacks, let’s say eating a full bag of M&M’s at once (this is my true ‘temptation’ :)). It is not OK if you do that every time, but if you already have a decent eating and exercising pattern, why can’t you cheat from time to time without feeling bad afterwards :).

Here comes the trick part: don’t lie to yourself or make excuses to grant yourself something you don’t really deserve. First of all: keep the right balance, which is adapted to your own lifestyle and with your own goals in mind. We should all work to become a better version of ourselves. On the other hand, we are not all professional athletes or top-level business owners and we don’t need to be. E.g. Pieter Timmers, Belgian Silver Olympic medalist, allows himself to follow an 80/20% eating pattern (except when he is in the final preparation before a race), where he can eat 20% of “unhealthy” snacks, compared to a strict diet for the other 80%. Everyone could gain benefit from these type of targets, so I have currently set mine to 66,6%. This can easily be expressed in time (20 days in a 30-day month) or in the amount of habits. I don’t allow any exception for some of my main habits, like drinking 2 glasses of water every morning, but I also allow myself to skip some less important routines that I consider less important to implement on a daily basis.

Thank you for reading and feel free to share your true ‘temptation’ in the comments below!