We regret to inform you that your beach body, slated for arrival in early June of this year, will be delayed, perhaps indefinitely. A number of factors, all under your direct control, have contributed to this unfortunate setback.
First and foremost, you are still eating a lot of food. While you have done an excellent job of including more vegetables in your diet, you have also included more of everything else, like cake. In the past month alone, you have eaten cake on eight occasions. None of which were birthday-related.
You have been complaining about your metabolism slowing down. Metabolic rate is difficult to determine, but what is certainly not slowing down is your intake of frozen French-bread pizzas. In fact, it is more than likely that one of those cheese-choked blubber-makers is circling inside your microwave at this very moment.
Making your hip-hop workout playlist right after the New Year seemed like a big step in the right direction. Of course, music can help only so much if you don’t own sneakers, which, technically, you didn’t until March.
While your recent efforts to increase the intensity of your workouts have been admirable, a look at the numbers indicates that your treadmill speeds have increased only from an average of 3.8 miles per hour to 3.9 miles per hour. Not surprisingly, the impact on your body has been negligible. One might argue that it has worked to your detriment, given that your duration on the treadmill has plummeted by an average of fourteen minutes.
As you know, motivation can be elusive. There are unseen forces that oppose motivation and seek to douse the flames of inspiration. In your case, that force is napping. You really do nap a lot.
This far into any successful beach-body program, you should not still be wearing your fat jeans. By now, you should have already held those jeans up in front of you and proudly marvelled that you were ever that big. But you can’t hold them up and marvel at them, because they are on your body. Snugly.
If you were to stay true to your original beach-body timeline, you would begin some preliminary swimsuit shopping right around now. Owing to the significant delays you’re experiencing, we do not recommend standing in front of a three-way mirror at this point, unless you want all three of you to feel terrible about yourselves.
As the days pass and the temperatures rise, you may find yourself scrambling to recalibrate your goals. To lose just five pounds instead of twenty, say, or to unearth just one ab instead of six. Sadly, when measured against the utopian physique you set out to achieve, these thoughts will quickly fade—drowned out, in all likelihood, by the crunch of a Cheeto.
In conclusion, with some significant life-style tweaks you could, according to our estimates, achieve your beach body by November. Just in time for Thanksgiving. Revealing your actual body before then, as you likely will, may trigger feelings of disappointment and guilt, even shame. Try to focus not on negative emotions but on ways in which you can stay positive and also stay submerged up to your neck for as much of the summer as possible. ♦