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Habits take 21 days to form

The experts say that it takes 21 days to form a new habit. Well, it’s been 21 days and I’m thinking they have a point. Although I’m 21 days into my challenge, I won’t say that I have consistently performed my new healthy habits for 21 days…that is just not reality. However, I’m getting there and I can honestly say it’s getting easier to perform these healthy habits.

The healthy daily habits in my case are:

Replace two of my meals with a healthy Herbalife Protein shake. I replace breakfast and lunch with a Herbalife shake.
Eat one normal meal. Don’t cut out, just cut back. For me, it’s my dinner.
Drink my Herbalife tablets three times a day (this is not habit yet 🙂 )
Drinking about 4.5 liters of water per day. (Check out my blog post on what your daily water requirements are.)
Consume my required daily protein intake every day (my body requires 150g of protein per day). Check out the post I did on “how to calculate your protein needs”. You want to be careful not to consume unnecessary calories in your quest to get your protein intake up. Choose the sources of your proteins wisely. Make sure it is complete proteins to begin with (otherwise you are wasting your time, as your body can’t use incomplete proteins) and make sure the protein score is high, as close to one as possible. All Herbalife’s shakes use complete proteins and have a protein score of 1. For example, an egg contains complete protein and have a protein score of 1. I usually take an extra Herbalife shake or Herbalife protein snack to get to my protein target for day.
Exercise for 30-45 minutes every day. Here I have discovered a little secret that I will let you in on. Once you have primed your body for a few days with proper nutrition, using your Herbalife shakes at least twice a day in order to feed your body all the nutrients it needs, and you follow all the other habits I listed above, you will automatically consume less calories per day than your body burns, which means you will begin to burn fat and lose weight. If you exercise in your fat burning zone (70% of your maximum heart rate), you can accelerate this process. You calculate your max heart rate by deducting your age from 220. Then you can even add a second and third training session of about 20 minutes each to your daily routine in order to burn more fat. However, if you want to do this you must ensure to meet your nutritional and protein targets with your diet, otherwise you will sabotage yourself. Remember, if you don’t get your required protein in that your muscles need, your body will break down your current healthy muscle tissue in order to get the amino acids it needs. You don’t want this to happen.

With the Herbalife Nutritional program I don’t have to calculate calories, or weigh and measure my food. Using it is as simple as 1-2-3.

eat 1 normal meal, don’t cut out, just cut back
replace 2 meals with a Herbalife shake (prepared as recommended on the label)
drink your tablets 3 times a day

This simple regime ensures that your body gets all the nutrients it needs in perfect balance every day, without you having to source the raw foods yourself, or to weigh and calculate nutrients and calories. It’s complete nutrition kept simple. Simple means anyone can do it.

Here are my Tanita results of this morning:

Weight 99 kg (up100g; over all down 3.5kg)
Body fat percentage 29.1% (up 1.2%; over all down 4.7%)
Body fat mass 28.8 kg (up by 1.2kg; over all down by 4.8kg)
Visceral fat 14 (1 down; overall 2 down)
Body water percentage 49.2% (down 0.6%; over all up by 0.8%)
Muscle mass 66.7 kg (down by 1.1kg; over all up by 1.2kg)
Metabolic age 68 (up by 5yrs)

The above results do not worry me. It looks like a typical “rhythm of life” thing. Tomorrow is measurement day. Looking forward to see what the measuring tape will have to say.

Have a great Monday!

p.s. By the way, if you wondered, the golf went great yesterday. I shot an 83 on a par 70 course. The conditions were tough and it was super hot. I could have done so much better. I had four 3 puts!!! Unforgivable, I know! And yes, I did swop out my Ping putter for my Odessy putter for the day. Guess who is back in my bag after yesterday? 🙂 This means I qualified in the A grade for the Summer Cup match play knockout rounds….too bad I will have to withdraw from the competition, as I won’t be able to play next Saturday. 🙁

Tags: 21 days to form a new habit, healthy habits, herbalife shake, Weight Loss