One of the fads I keep hearing most about is the 21-day fix. I have even heard about other college students being advocates for this program — is this program worth its (pun intended) weight?

As you can guess, the fad is a 21-day program. It involves a set of six videos: cardio fix, upper fix, lower fix, Pilates fix, dirty fix, yoga fix and a total body cardio fix workout. The videos are 30 minutes long, and there is a video for each day of the week, working out to be a perfect three-week rotation.

Portion-sized containers come along with the exercises. They are color-coded and sized for the different foods they are supposed to hold. The two largest containers are purple for fruit and green for vegetables. Now continually going down in size is yellow for carbohydrates, blue for healthy fats and cheeses, and two orange containers for seeds and oils. There are enough containers for each meal so that you get the right portion of each food group for every meal. It also comes with a Shakeology shaker cup and mix.

After 21 days of following the fitness program and using the containers correctly, like all exercise programs, you are promised to see great results for that beach body you always wanted.

Now this sounds great and all, but it comes with a price: $150. It could be thought of as a “deal” of sorts, since buying the Shakeology set and fitness videos as a bundle comes with a slight discount.

But let’s look at the pros and cons. Some of the pros are that it only is a 30-minute workout per day. Most people can manage that, right? Secondly, it gives you a simple structure to follow a good nutrition plan.

The obvious con is the price. I don’t know a lot of college students who are willing to drop $150 on just anything. In fact, I know a lot of students who don’t want to spend that much on books.

One of the biggest problems with diets is that people are looking for a quick fix. As soon as the diet is over they go back to eating the way they did before and gain all the weight back. Nothing was actually gained (except weight) because you still have all the bad habits that you had before.

The 21-day fix is trying to teach you to eat the right foods and in the right portions. If you keep up the exercise and the nutrition concepts, this could be a program that gives you results that stay. But just like any program it can’t do it all — you have to put in the mental effort to stick with a healthy lifestyle.

So with all the benefits a program may have, it is still all up to you to do the real work.