Twenty eight days have come and gone, and the barre3 challenge is officially over. It's a good thing because I leave for Europe on Friday, and I am pretty sure they live off bread, wine, cheese and pasta in Italy. God Bless the Italians! I am coming for you and all of your delicious gluten, dairy and alcohol products! As they say, "when in Rome"! (side note, I am not going to Rome)
As you know from last week's post, I spent the week in Sun Valley. Going into the final week of the challenge, my goal was to do the best I could to stick the "rules", but I knew it would be difficult. I mean, who could resist a Bowl of Soul and raspberry muffin from Java? Not this girl!
This final week for me was a test of the "28 to Great" principles in the real world! And here is what I concluded, and what I really already knew, life is all about BALANCE (it's no coincidence that balance is a key principle of the barre3 practice), and overall I am doing pretty well!
Each day you are faced with a variety of choices; choices about what you eat, how much you exercise, how much you sleep, how much you work, etc. If 80% of the time you make healthy, balanced choices and 20% you eat chocolate, drink wine, sit on the couch and watch a movie, then I believe you have achieved a healthy balance in your life. Some days call for tea and some days call for coffee. Sometimes a salad satisfies your hunger and sometimes it takes a cheeseburger. One day you might exercise for 2 hours and the next day not at all. Everything in moderation.
As I talked about last Tuesday, the constant quest for perfection can be exhausting. While the premise of the challenge was not "28 to perfect", it is easy to convince yourself that if you don't follow the "rules" you are a failure. It is extremely common for women to obsess over being the perfect healthy eating, lean and mean exercising machine (Gwyneth Paltrow's blog
GOOP could make us all feel lazy and unhealthy). But I say, if you even signed up for this challenge and made small efforts to better yourself and improve your health, then you've done well.
I will honestly say that participating in the challenge was a lot of work. I spent time getting in more workouts, hunting down obscure cooking items, prepping and cooking food and planning out how I would execute the challenge principles in my daily life. There were aspects of it that I found well worth the extra efforts, but others were not, i.e when my husband leaves town for 2 days I will drink wine! There is no substitute!
Life is all about balance, and in my final week I achieved just that. I did a few barre3 online workouts, I went alpine and XC skiing nearly every day and I worked out with my mom at the gym. On the opposite side of the spectrum, I drank hot chocolate with whipped cream, I ate pancakes, cookies and pizza and drank wine...even at lunch (GASP)!
On Friday I will be getting on a plane bound for Austria and Italy and again will do my best to balance healthy choices with indulgence! I will definitely be using barre3 online to get in some workouts while I am away. I promise to post updates from across the pond when I have a chance!
In the mean time, don't forget you can use the code "15barre3CC" to get a 15 free trial of barre3 online (expires February 8th).
