The 75 hard challenge: what is it?
I recently finished the 75 hard challenge and lost 40 pounds. For 75 days straight, you have to drink 1 gallon of water a day, work out twice a day for 45 minutes (once indoors and once outdoors), pick a diet then stick to it with no cheat meals and no alcohol, take a progress pic every day, and read 10 pages. Just as a warning, this challenge is considered to be unsustainable in the long term because of how intense it is. However, personally I started this challenge just to prove to myself that I could be consistent and then when I started losing weight, I got addicted to the scale going down and kept going. I also think this challenge can help you gain skills and discipline that you may doubt yourself having so it’s a nice way to learn more about yourself and what you can achieve as well as how hard you can push yourself.
How it went
I’ll walk you through how the challenge went for me. To start off with exercise, I didn’t have a gym membership, so I made the most of my resources. I went running and jogging every day on the trails behind my house and would pick different trails to explore, which helped keep it interesting because I tend to get bored easily. I hated running, but you really have to learn how to pace yourself.
At first, I would run really fast and get burned out in just a few minutes, not allowing me to keep going for long distances. After my friend taught me how to pace myself, I was able to run for 35 minutes straight without any breaks. Therefore, I incorporated this into my daily runs and would run 20-25 minutes on the trail, then turn around and cool down for 1-2 minutes, then finish the rest of the 45 minutes by the time I got back to my house. I always ran while holding my water bottle and phone; I am not one of those people who can run without water or without listening to music.
As for my indoor workouts, I switched it up, but I would typically do a HIIT workout on my mat for the whole 45 minutes. I loved following Sydney Cummings’s videos on YouTube to do these HIIT workouts. Other than that, sometimes I would do this step machine I got from TikTok called a “stepper,” which is about $40. Sometimes I did random workouts, and I definitely had to change my workout routine when I would go on vacation. You have to go into it knowing that you’ll have to adjust and be flexible to anything coming up while still completing the requirements of the challenge.
My Diet
As for diet, I cut out carbs and processed foods and instead focused on protein intake. I went into a calorie deficit for the entire challenge. I also had to switch around my diet because I knew I would get bored if I ate the same thing every day. Some foods I would eat were eggs, fruit, veggies, turkey, lettuce wraps, drumsticks, lamb chops, shrimp/fish, soups, salads, yogurt/acai bowls, and nuts. The water intake was also not hard for me to hit, I had an Owala so if I drank 5.33 Owala’s then I hit my goal. This wasn’t hard because I would drink at least 2-3 while working out, and then I would keep water on me the rest of the day which allowed me to consistently drink from it. I would also drink water when I felt hungry because sometimes you aren’t actually hungry but your body can’t differentiate between water and food. Therefore, if you drink water and wait 5 minutes then it can satisfy that feeling of hunger because your body actually just needed water instead.
If you go out with your friends, you have to make sure you set your boundaries with alcohol because you can easily mess up this part of the challenge at the moment. I also think you should go back to your progress pics frequently. I didn’t notice the change in my body until towards the end of the challenge but the progress pics really helped me see the difference and it helped me feel more motivated to keep going because I was finally seeing results after so long.
challenges
There will be some days where you don’t feel like doing any of this or your day gets so hectic that you don’t even know how you’ll do it and you have to be prepared for those days, especially as you get towards the end. For me, one way to keep myself accountable and keep me going was to make a TikTok about it where I would film every day after I completed my workouts, checking another day off the list. This method of checking off the days really helped me keep going because I wanted to keep getting closer to 75/75, and it was cool to see how many days went by. I felt like I couldn’t miss a day, or else I would ruin the whole countdown.