12 WEEKS: I SMASHED THIS!

People usually say the days are long, but the years are short when they're talking about babies growing up, but the same saying epitomizes exactly what I feel about the 12-week Pherform FFL Program. It's so true that the days were so long, some stretching arduously longer than others, especially when we were battling cravings, placed in social situations where we couldn't have our cake (or bread) and eat it, and when all we had to turn to was that damned mountain of broccoli.

But the weeks and months are truly short, and they have flown by. In the flurry of time passing, how much better I've gotten to know my body and how to take care of it nutritionally, and just how efficient I've gotten at meal prepping, 12 weeks went by in the blink of an eye. 

   

Three months, three phases, three checkmarks. 

From the crazy strict Blitz phase where we bid sayonara to all fruit and all starches for 4 weeks to the more forgiving Burn and Balance stages where some of our sanity was restored by sexy starches like sweet potato and chickpeas... we've really worked our butts off and it's all come down to this. 

You may remember just how much I was dreading my very first Dexa scan 13 weeks ago, just a week before the program officially kicked off. 

This was the not-so-great visual I was left with at that scan - the Dexa Before picture of a girl who was carrying a 32.4% fat mass:

12 weeks of sheer hard work later, a very different girl popped up on the second Dexa scan I did today:

Holy smokes! Look ma, no more muffin top and back folds!

Here's a side-by-side comparison:

In a nutshell, the Dexa After scan revealed that I:

• Lost 7.1% fat mass to 25.3% body fat
  (30-40% is considered acceptable for women under the Dexa figures, so I'm surprisingly under this range!) 
• Lost 11 lbs of body fat
• Lost 18 lbs of body weight
• Lost 0.9% of muscle mass (To be expected with the fat mass loss - and to be regained later!)
• Experienced most significant losses in my upper body (arms) and core

Just to illustrate how much body fat I'd shed, Glen took this picture of me:

What I have in my hands is what 2 pounds of fat looks like visually. Imagine my shock when Glen said that I have lost THREE blocks of this.

THREE.

BLOCKS OF YELLOW GELATINOUS GOOP-LOOKING FAT MASS.

So yes, the days were long, and they were hard, making this the single biggest challenge I've ever put myself through, but it was so completely worth it. Every single day and every single ounce of hard work I put in, every bit of sacrifice, every time I had to say no to something I really wanted, every time I had to push myself that extra mile more... Every single one of those times was all completely worth it.