What's in a (Website) Name

Out of curiousity, I decided to see if the website url http://www.sixmonthsixpack.com/ was available. Lo and behold, it was! But then I thought it'd be interested to check on a few other domain names. So I searched for www.sixweeksixpack.com and www.sixdaysixpack.com and www.sixminutesixpack.com. Somewhat not surprisingly, 2 of these 3 urls have already been purchased by squatters. Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised. After all, we (myself included) are all guilty of trying to find shortcuts when it comes to challenges. If I told you there was a way to get a six pack in six weeks vs. six months, obviously you'd choose the former. But my whole purpose in starting this blog is to ground my fitness goals into, well, REALITY. I've done workout programs and diets in the past, and I can tell you from long experience that nothing worth accomplishing can be done in less than a month. Sure you might see some minor improvements, but if you're really committed to a program (diet, exercise, or otherwise) you need at least two months to see a signficant difference.

My most recent example was my experience with the P90X workout program. I'll talk more about that endeavor in a future post. But suffice to say, the first 30 days were REALLY tough. The diet, the daily workouts, the constant denial of carbs. And after 30 days when I took some checkpoint photos of myself I was, to be honest, a bit disappointed. It's not that I hadn't lost any weight. It's just that I couldn't really SEE the big difference. It was all I could do not to chuck the DVDs in the trash and cram down a plate full of fettucini alfredo. It was only the constant encouragement of friends that helped me soldier on with the program. So I did. And 60 days later, I could see the difference. In fact, everyone could. Now, even my parents are saying, "Wow, you look a lot fitter than the last time we saw you." And they never notice anything!

When I started this new blog, I knew it would take more than a couple months to really get a six pack. And as I thought about blog names, the idea of a six pack in six weeks never even crossed my mind. Maybe if I was willing to starve myself on some sort of liquid diet and do 5000 crunches a day, I might be able to pull it off. But this journey isn't meant to be some sort of crash course on ab development. It's meant to figure out if I can get a six pack, without being the guy at the steakhouse that goes, "I'll have the garden salad with the fat-free vinaigrette dressing on the side." And that's going to take a lot longer than six weeks...