Thrive Before/After pics

Hello fellow Thrivers,

I just finished the level 1 course. I hope it's okay to post my before/after pics in a general thread. They were taken quickly with a camera phone, so please forgive the quality. There have been some substantial lifestyle changes for me on this course. I think the main one is becoming more conscious/directed in one's behavior. I never monitored how much water I drank, for instance, and now I must conclude that I was probably dehydrated a lot of the time. I work in NYC--what many would admit/boast is a stressful place--and used to grab a beer or two to drink and unwind on the Metro North every day after work. That's stopped, and that's not a minor thing for me. I like how the focus on prioritizing certain kinds of foods gently but effectively pushes "sub-optimal" ones away. There's simply no room left for processed junk. Do I eat perfectly? No. But I'm making up a lot of lost time. I feel mentally more focused, and emotionally more level. (And my wife digs the abs.) Thanks Jeff. I'll see you at Level 2.   

Way to go!! Great progress. Thanks for posting. 

Have you replaced the beers with another habit/activity to unwind? I find my weakest moments in diet are when I'm overwhelmed in life and I "deserve" a break. 

Very nice! 

Julia, 

That train ride is still a tricky temptation, but I have a green tea when I get home. It might sound silly, but the wholesomeness of the tea, drunk in the home with my wife, is very comforting to me now. So I only need will power for the few mins from when I arrive at the train station to when I get on the train--and anyone can be tough for 5mins or so. Plus, Sunday is Sunday, so I'm having a beer or wine on that day without fail. And it tastes better than ever now. Prohibition with occasional "outs" might be the key to happiness!

Wow, that is some amazing progress for what I'd say is a short amount of time. Congratulations! I'm only on lesson 4 still so this post gives me something to look forward to. Hopefully Thrive 2 will indeed be a thing as I'm really enjoying the approach gradually introducing new bits of behaviors - something that regular books/videos/courses fail to achieve and can seem overwhelming.

Wow that's impressive Colm! Congrats dude on finishing level 1 too, think you might be the first or one of them.

Am looking to join you soon. I'm only 2 or 3 weeks away barring a fail to hit my target for a day. Am hoping my abs will look as good as yours!

Thanks guys--this was only 10 weeks work. You might do better than me, as I wasn't exercising at full capacity. And I want to point out that I'm pretty sure I wasn't getting the portion sizes right every time. (The fats especially I was largely guessing most days.) So if I can refine those portion skills I might progress further. Good luck to everyone. 

Woah, awesome job! Hope to see the same kind of progress further down the road.

Dude! Im out of time for the AM I will come back and respond in the PM but Awesome work!!!!! Awesome!!!!!! Great job! This is so cool! You are the first to post before and after pics and they are legit body transformation!! 

More to follow this afternoon! 

Colm, 

Great work! Way to stick with it and make this happen for yourself. What a cool achievement!? Your before and after pictures are great. Merunas is absolutely right -that is a lot of progress! 

Im glad to here you are more conscious and directed in your behaviors and actions. This is what is going to make the progress you have made in the past 10 weeks continue for the rest of your life. 

Great job!

Jeff 

Colm, I was inspired by your post! So I thought I'd share my before and after pics as well. This is Jan 3rd and Mar 12th, so just a little over two months apart. I definitely noticed a difference! It's very encouraging to see the change. I'm pumped for how much change will happen over a year

ps... I was getting the fat portions way wrong for a while too... waaaay too much fat

Thanks for posting man,

Cam

Cam,

Your suspect title has been lifted. Nice job man. I hope you can see the substantial progress you have made. You have also been one of the people who make it fun for me too! Thank you and keep up the good work. As you know there is no such thing as too many questions. 

Cheers,
Jeff

Great work! You look like you lost a lot of weight around the mid-section. Must make chins, dips, etc a fair bit easier!

Haha Colm, you would think so, but they're still hard 

Jeff - thanks very much! I've enjoyed it as well. Kudos to you and the program  Looking forward to further levels!

Cam

Hi Jeff,

There are no before/after pictures, mainly because there’s not much of a change in my body composition. And I didn’t expect it to be. I’m about 150lbs  @ 13%. I would want to go down to 10%, and I could, but that would mean losing weight and getting even lighter, which I don’t necessarily want/like. No doubt, adding muscle, staying at 150 and going to 10% would be great, but that means pushing hard through my workouts and at the moment some nagging shoulder issues are preventing me from doing that. We’ll see once I feel 100% and start pushing how much I can add at 53 years old. I’m guessing not that much, but it’ll have be OK.

Going back to the Thrive way of eating:

I signed up for this course mainly because I wanted to learn more about nutrition. I think I was already somewhat close to your plan, although there were definitely things I had to change. One was to add more starch; the other was timing the lunch and dinner vegetables and reversing raw/cooked cycle. Those two were easy. What was hard for me was the protein/fat only breakfast. I’m still not 100% done with that, but getting close. Milk, berries, and nuts were a common mix for me at breakfast until protein/fat task was added to the program. You probably think it’s an alright mix, but I can also see you say “it’s not optimal”. So I’m still working on that one. I just need to find a bit of variety to keep me consistent. Fish was out of the question for breakfast for me, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that I actually liked yogurt, smoked salmon and avocado at breakfast. And I add one square of 86% chocolate with some nuts to it and hoping that 2.5 g of sugar (none of which is fructose) is OK. I don’t know if it will be Thrive 2 compliant, but I think it’ll come pretty close.

So to sum it up: Overall I’m pretty happy that I signed up for the course. I’ve learned quite a bit, and I will continue with Thrive 2 and possibly what comes after it. I enjoy this stuff..

And again, thanks for your help as always.

Haha, no not level 2 compliant. But your workouts(and mine) aren't enough for a olympian, thats okay. Don't worry about whats ahead, just whats in front of you. You are completing all of your steps and doing so perfectly it sounds to me. No where in there does it say you have to be 100% protein/fat. Do your steps to the letter of the law and take priding in completing them. Don't try to get so advanced you only feel bad about the things you aren't doing. 

Awesome, well done, guys.

And, damn it! I just realized I forgot to mark almost all my tasks on Saturday. I look forward to joining you guys at the end, if I can stop forgetting to mark a day every 2 or 3 weeks.

Well, I also reached the final step and it's nice to see what others have accomplished! Nice job!

I thought about the pics but there was not much change for me either. I did go down from 74.7kg to 72.3kg (as of today: 14/03/2016) during the last 12 weeks. But I've always been "skinny fat" and that still hasn't changed. My nutrition was already 90% of what Thrive is, so I just had to adapt a few things and lose the fear of potatoes hahaha.. I had been eating mainly sweet potatoes for a long time that I also forgot how I like regular potatoes as well. I also started to like butternut squash, but those are harder to find over here. I haven't noticed any performance improvements, but mainly keeping the same strength should be enough for now, but that means that I won't progress much until I do get rid of all that extra weight (maybe 4-5 kg still). In any case, this nutritonal base to always come back to is ingrained in my mind and makes sense for me. No more playing around with paleo, low carb, IF.... let's keep it simple

Looking forward to level 2 and beyond! 

Thanks Jeff for your patience and guidance and some blunt humor as well hahaha

Richard,

Nice work. Give yourself credit thats 2.5kg of presumably fat GONE! The leaner and heather you are the harder it is to loose fat. Going from 10 to 8% is harder than 15 to 11. Good job, take a hard look at those before and after pics. Im sure you can see something. 

So, what's this final step? 

Seriously though, nicely done all of you who completed Level 1! I think I'm not too far behind, just like Travis, I need to stop forgetting to check tasks. Forgetting once slows down quite considerably, and I did that twice, I think. That's too bad because those were days where I still had full compliance. Oh well, more time to reinforce good habits. 

Set the dashboard as your home page. Any time you open a new tab, all the daily goals will be there, staring at you.

4 minutes ago, Merunas Astrauskas said:

Set the dashboard as your home page. Any time you open a new tab, all the daily goals will be there, staring at you.

This guy wins the internet

Clashes with saving the tabs when you close the browser, sadly. I try to leave it open all the time so it pops up again when I start it again, but when I 'clean' the browser of the sea of tabs, I sometimes accidentally close the one tab I shouldn't. That's exactly what happened on Saturday. I had it opened almost all day long and closed it at some point. When I got in a rush to leave after dinner, I just completely forgot...

16 hours ago, Merunas Astrauskas said:

Set the dashboard as your home page. Any time you open a new tab, all the daily goals will be there, staring at you.

The failure is not an option method. Nice!

I set a reminder on my cell phone that goes off everyday at 7pm.  The reminder simply says "save your task".  I picked 7 because I know that with very rare exceptions I am finished with all my tasks for the day by 7pm.  I started this after I missed one day because I forgot.  I have never missed a day since.