Is it even possible (excluding the fact if someone does nothing but work out or work out for hours every day)?
In: Biology
If your not in great shape and start working out a lot and eating well you can put on around 1-2lbs of muscle a week. The better shape you are in the harder it is to put on more muscle. 6 weeks is enough to put on around 10lbs of muscle if you do it right and that will make a noticeable difference. This of course assumes your goal is building muscle, if your trying to lose fat you can lose a similar amount of fat, but the type of diet and exercise you will focus on will be different.
Depending on your starting point you will be able to see *some* change but nowhere near the results implied in all of those programs with a narrow time window. I want to say that not even with the most aggressive steroid regiment would these kind of changes not possible but there are the occasional program that could deliver those results in that time with an aggressive steroid regiment. Oh and lifting 7 times a week on top of whatever snake oil fad program you are following
It really depends on the person, 6 weeks isn’t a lot of time to make large changes but you can definitely make progress.
Now things like 6-7-8 minute workouts can be super effective if you’re consistent with them. It doesn’t take a ton of exercise to build muscle and tone it up, and only 1-2 times a week per muscle group.
It’s much easier to transform by losing fat than it is to transform by gaining muscle. Someone can reasonably, without crash dieting, lose 2 lbs of fat a week. It takes weeks and weeks for even beginners to gain 2 lbs of muscle.
So if you’re overweight, yes you could potentially transform yourself with a modified fasting diet and lose 2-6 lbs of fat a week, depending on your starting point.
It’s certainly “possible” to make very dramatic changes to lbm and bf% in that short of a time. Now, is it particularly healthy to maximize change in that short of a window? No, because maximized change would include exogenous hormones and some pretty serious fat loss agents along with diuretics.
It all depends on what you mean by transformation.
You can certainly *feel* like your body has made a transformation if you go from completely sedentary and then suddenly eat healthy and exercise for 6 weeks straight. You’ll have more energy and a general feeling of wellness that you didn’t before.
Physical change will be noticeable and measurable. You aren’t going to look like a different person but you probably will feel like a different person.
6 weeks you can start to see and feel a difference. A close friend of mine went from pretty overweight to slim and very muscular in less than 6 months. You could consider it a transformation within 4. He has focussed very hard on nutrition, adhering strictly to macros and following lean and bulking cycles. The difference is amazing.
By contrast, I’m the same age, I run, I’ve done a daily HIIT class for over 3 years, and looking at me you wouldn’t know. Looking jacked isn’t my goal, but if it is-it’s 90% diet.
If you are consistent for 6 weeks on an extremely strict diet and exercise program, you will definitely see a visible difference. But this is what people mean when they say “diets don’t work.” It’s possible to create a huge change in 6 weeks, but the type of regimen required to create a massive change in 6 weeks is not sustainable. Once you stop the program and return to old habits, your body goes back.
And it’s not just a “oh if you go from eating healthy to eating Popeyes every day of course you will change.” Those “body transformation boot camp crash courses” are intentionally unsustainable; while if you make basic healthy lifestyle changes you will start to see improvement around 6 weeks, it won’t be dramatic. Dramatic change in 6 weeks would require dramatic action. That’s why those programs have super intense, restrictive, and often weird diets and exercise regimens. You’re not going to drop 30 pounds in 6 weeks by jogging a mile a day and cutting out dessert. You might if you are doing a weird rotation of “dry toast and 300 burpees on Thursday, then raw meat and 2 hours on the treadmill at 10% incline Friday, juice fast Saturday” or whatever, but you cannot live that way for decades. You will lose weight, gain it back even if you improve your daily habits, then go back to searching for some other quick fix that magically transforms your body but never needs maintenance. It’s like this because it is making someone lots of money to keep you on that metaphorical treadmill. In the long run….you’d have been better off jogging a mile a day and cutting out dessert, even though that barely shows results at 6 weeks.
To make a substantial and sustainable change, you likely need to make significant but lower key changes that you can stick to essentially for life.
Not a lot is going to happen from working out in 6 weeks. The biggest change will come from diet but it also depends on what “body transformation” entails.
If it means lose body fat, well let’s look at some numbers. There’s around 7700 calories in 1kg of body fat. Let’s say you target a fairly extreme calorie deficit of 1000 calories/day. 1000 * 7 * 6=42000 burned calories. 42000/7700= 5.45kg of total potential body fat lost (this ignoring some factors like how your metabolic rate changes as you lose weight/go into a high deficit but is good enough for a rough idea).
If it means gain muscle, it’s going to be much much less significant. Gaining muscle is significantly harder and happens much more slowly (think on the scale of years, not weeks).
But as others have pointed out, the biggest issue with “6 week” type of programs is it sets up the idea that this is temporary, people do these programs then stop doing anything and return to their previous lifestyle which quickly undoes anything you would have gained in those 6 weeks. If you want to look and feel different, you need to change your lifestyle, permanently. This means finding a sustainable source of exercise and change in diet that becomes part of your new lifestyle, forever.
I’ve lost 30-40lbs in under six weeks by stopping sugar and walking at brisk pace on the treadmill for an hour a day
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