75 Hard Update
75 hard is this challenge that is really testing how disciplined you can be, in my opinion. Here is the official website for it: 75 Hard. Basically, the challenge includes a set of rules and you must complete all of them every single day for, you guessed it, 75 days. The rules are:
Two 45 minute workouts
One must be outdoors
Follow a diet
Take a progress pic
Drink 1 gallon of water
Read 10 pages (non-fiction book)
No alcohol or cheat meals
Doesn’t sound too difficult but each of these come with their own challenges. Surprisingly, finding time for two 45 minute workouts has been surprisingly easy. I play tennis most days for 90 minutes, at the very least, so that’s pretty easy since it’s outdoors, but I think the goal of this rule is to push you to try different workouts that you normally wouldn’t do. I feel like I’ve played so much tennis in life that my body doesn’t even burn that many calories from it? That sounds so dumb as I type it but I really do feel like my body has gotten used to it. I’ve started to incorporate different workouts into the rotation. Because of my peloton membership, I have access to all of their on-demand classes, so I can take all kinds of different classes. Yoga, barre, spin, strength, etc. I don’t love all of them but I always feel better afterward.
Following a diet is way harder for me than exercise. I do like cooking but I hate cooking for one person and I hate cleaning up all the dishes. I’ve gotten into a very bad habit of ordering all of my food from seamless again so I’m trying to eat more home-cooked meals. My coworker recommended Hungryroot, which is this meal kit kind of delivery service. I get a box each week with groceries for recipes that I have picked out online. All of the recipes are very quick to make and that’s because they’re simple but also some of the ingredients are already cooked — I just have to heat them up. It’s perfect for throwing something good & healthy together in between back-to-back zoom calls.
My favorite rule of the challenge is something that I never thought I would enjoy and it’s not even “fitness” related. I had a book that I started reading over a year ago and I just left it and never picked it up again. With this challenge, I finished that book and even got started on another book. The first book was about the different ways that people think and the second one is about becoming a better leader. I recently started a new role at work and started managing other people — something I have never really done before. I hate not being good at something so right now I’m just trying to ask a ton of questions from people that I know have leadership positions, both at work and outside of work, because they’ve all gone through similar struggles. This book, Small Acts of Leadership by G. Shawn Hunter, has taught me so many things and honestly has validated some of my feelings during the transition into the new role.
I started the challenge 13 days ago and the absolute hardest part for me was the no drinking bit. I’ve been so proud of myself for going 13 days without drinking. I realized that I’ve built my entire social life around drinking and I didn’t want to get to a point where I couldn’t stop if I wanted to. I was eating like shit and drinking like crazy and I just did not feel good physically or mentally about myself. This is why it was important for me to even start this challenge, not because it’s trending on TikTok.
Last night I went to dinner with friends and I decided to have a drink. I had maybe 1 glass or a glass and a half of prosecco with dinner and then a small margarita at Steph’s that I don’t even think I finished? This morning I woke up pretty upset with myself for breaking my drinking fast but then I thought that 13 days of not drinking compared to how I was living before was better than I could have imagined. Even more impressive was that I went to dinner and had a couple of drinks and that’s it. How many times do you say you’re going to have one drink and actually have one drink? Or in this case two. Hardly ever. I think that it’s harder for me to just have 1 or 2 and stop than to not drink at all, so instead of feeling upset with myself, I’ve decided to let myself be okay with my choices. The rules say that if you fail the challenge on any given day, you have to start over.
For me, it was never about not drinking ever again or being on a diet for the rest of my life. It was more about testing my discipline and pushing myself to break bad habits and establish better ones. In just 13 days my body has completely changed. My jeans go on without me having to jump up and down or suck my stomach in to button them. My sports bras aren’t cutting off my circulation anymore and more importantly, I just feel better in general. I’m not implementing drastic changes into my daily routine, but instead, I’m just making small changes that have a big impact. I don’t know what comes next — Do I start all over? Do I start drinking once a week? I don’t know. I just know that I needed that hard reset and I know that it’s working to my advantage & I can’t wait to see what’s next, whatever that may be.
