I find it very difficult to support them, unless they are undertaken as a great way to build healthy habits, such as cooking more healthily, regularly exercising in a fun way, things that legitimately focus on HEALTH. And these do exist, usually within communities that are supportive and encouraging - if you find this, DO IT! It might change your life.
But such a healthy-habit focus is the rare exception, in my experience. These short-term efforts usually focus on appearance, because it's hard to measure changes in overall health in 6 weeks, or celebrate something as unsexy as 30 days of habit-building - but it's very easy to measure pounds & inches.
And that's what the consumer wants anyway.
So, the 30 days or 6 weeks are about the quick fix: drastic changes that can only ever be temporary...and you are then supposed to go back to your normal life, but svelter, and OBVIOUSLY happier.
The problem is, you may not be able to. You may think that the way you lived those six grueling weeks should be the way you live your everyday life. So you try to keep it up, but eventually you fail. Then you may give up on health & fitness altogether, or you may have simply completely fucked up your hormones, or developed an eating disorder. You most likely will regain the exact same weight you lost, maybe more.
It happened to me. I learned that those six weeks have great power to Fuck. You. Up.
This guy writes about his 6-pack #absperiment: http://greatist.com/fitness/six-pack-abs-six-weeks-one-year-later And what he learned, this right here, is absolutely PROFOUND, and yet you won't realize this until after you, too, have fucked yourself up:
You don’t need six-pack abs to be happy. And sometimes getting them can make you less happy than when you started.
YES. Except "sometimes" should be "99.99% of the time." And "less happy" should be "infinitely more miserable."
Honestly, I wish he had written more extensively about the impact on his mind, rather than keeping it short & sweet, because it's basically everything I've gone through since 2010. And I'm STILL not over it, nearly 6 years later.
Some days I get close, and much more frequently than before, but the evil voice, she always manages to get back in, and whisper her hateful chorus: "you're fat, you're getting fatter, eat less, try fasting again, go low carb, cycle carbs, you're gross, look at your belly, look at that cellulite, god, what are you doing, you're always going to be fat, you worthless piece of shit."
And this horrendously evil cunty internal voice wasn't in my head before the 6-week body-fat beatdown that made me equate my value with my appearance. Before, I was unhappy with my appearance, but it didn't define me. I felt strong and healthy and I was having fun with fitness, though I disliked my belly...and I wish to every imagined god that I had been content with that right there.
Because as I lost fat, I gained compliments left and right, and I loved them, soaked them up, put myself in a position to hear them again & again...and I began to believe that it was vital I be small & pretty, that it fucking MATTERED. So once I had fucked up my hormones, metabolism, whatever the science would call it, and gained weight despite giving all of my effort to undereating and overexercising, I became unworthy of compliments, I became unworthy of love, especially from my own damn self.
I am coming up on the 6-year anniversary of my 6 weeks, and the best way I could celebrate it would be to stop others, YOU, from doing this. I want you to learn from the mistakes of the rest of us. I do not want you, or anyone, to feel the way I felt...feel. Because it is no way to live your life. It's perfectly awful.
Sure, there's no guarantee this will happen to you. Some people spend 6 weeks on an annual or semi-annual basis targeting their body fat, and then go back to normal life, and don't spiral into long-term obsessions and eating disorders.
But...those people probably aren't scouring the internet for topics like this. They don't rush from link to link, trying to find the secret to the happy life a smaller body will give them, if they could just GET IT.
So, let me pull back from all that rambling about my messy life, that I can't tie up in a bow (some day, I hope), and simply beg you: use caution.
Short-term transformations aren't inherently bad, but they are dangerous territory.
Why not craft your own challenge instead?
Seek sustainable life changes during the next month. Add a healthy habit like replacing soda with water, toaster pastries with eggs, or takeout pizza with homemade. Instead of watching that crappy TV show every Wednesday night, join your SO for a walk through the neighborhood. Instead of sitting on the bleachers during your son's soccer game, make laps around the track.
Skip the beat-you-to-a-pulp cardio-based fitness classes that leave you feeling like a fat heaving cow compared to the tiny perky instructor, and invest in a good personal trainer who can teach you how to lift. Join a softball league and quit your dart league.
Do a Whole30, not for weight loss (ever), but to learn exactly how your body responds to different foods (and then make a planned, careful, slow reintroduction phase, not a simple return to "before").
Or, focus on the mental, and spend 6 weeks working on loving your body for what it is, what it has done, what it can do. Because it's damned amazing, no matter what it looks like.
Little things like this are unsexy, but oh, my friend, the changes you will experience will be lifelong, and so much more beneficial than shaming yourself into pursuing a tinier version of you. You are capable of so much more than looking pretty & thin. You are not an ornament.
When you're 90, and looking back on your life...what will you be most proud of?
It won't be losing 10 pounds in a month, and it definitely won't be giving yourself an eating disorder.
You will be VERY proud of having built a healthy life, which gave you many quality years of enjoyment.
So do that.
More of that.
ALL of that.
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