Tag Archives: 75hard

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NEW DAY 56: They don’t call it 75 Easy

It’s day 4 of 75 Hard, and boyyyyyy, is it ever! I linked to the rules in my previous post, but here’s the rap down of what I will be doing every day for the next 75 71:

  • Taking a daily full-body progress selfie (for my eyes only)
  • Reading at least 10 pages of a non-fiction book in the vein of self-improvement
  • Drinking 1 gallon (4 litres) of water
  • Not consuming any alcohol
  • Picking a diet to follow and not straying AT ALL (I’m doing 0 added sugar)
  • Working out twice per day for at least 45 minutes each time, 3 hours minimum apart — and one session has to be outdoors, rain or shine

As with Whole 30, these rules are iron clad and the regimen is as strict as it gets. If you fail in any of these components for a given day, you have failed the challenge. If you want to continue, you have to start all over from the very beginning.

It’s mostly carving out the time for all the things plus 2 workouts per day that is throwing me. I’ve been making it work, but it’s been tricky. My body is tired. I have no temptation to give up, but the mental fortitude required to keep going is no joke!

I’ve joined 3 DietBets this week, so I’ ve had a peek at the scale for my weigh-ins. I’m down another couple of pounds since starting 75 Hard. The cool part is that I can actually feel and see it now. Crazy how a couple of pounds can be what it takes to make all the progress suddenly show up! I’m participating in this challenge primarily for psychological soundness reasons, but won’t pretend I’m not excited about the weight loss I’m anticipating by the end.

It feels so good to start believing in myself again.

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NEW DAY 52: Vacation (all I ever wanted)

I got home yesterday from 2 weeks of traveling. I saw new places with familiar faces, spent a lot of time outdoors, and truly got away from things that I needed an escape from. I am back feeling recharged and still committed to healthy living. I actually missed the gym while I was away — and I continued to have no interest in tasty treats. The scale rewarded my consistency with a 4-lb loss.

Part of my travels was with a friend I hadn’t seen in a decade. In the time since, she has become very outdoorsy and athletic: she’s an avid hiker, jogger, and rock climber. When I say she’s athletic, I mean she’s climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro. Recently. (Yeah, that’s right, my people are freakin’ cool.) So uh, I did have some concerns about whether I’d be able to keep up with her while we were roaming around our leg of the trip. I’m not saying I was matching her pace, but I was matching her energy level, and I wasn’t all out of breath and incapable of doing the things we wanted to do because I was too overweight and out of shape. Of all the high points of my trip — which was made up of almost exclusively high points — this is the one I may be happiest about.

I took myself on a bucket-list trip to Australia back in October for my birthday. I had always wanted to make that trip, but hesitated not only because of the expense and the fact that it would be a solo trek, but perhaps most of all because I knew there would be things that my size and (lack of) fitness would preclude me from doing, which I would have wanted to do. Sure enough, there were activities I had to opt out of for those reasons. The things I did do, I found took a lot longer for me to do and required a lot more energy to do than they should have. It was perhaps the worst shape I’ve ever been in on a trip like that, which is regrettable. I’m still glad I went, but I can’t pretend I feel no disappointment from the overall experience. I look forward to going back on a redemption trip there at some future point.

Come Monday, my daily routine will be changing and I’ll have to figure out how to reconfigure my schedule to include exercise time. I’m beginning 75 Hard with the friend who knows about this blog (hi!) tomorrow on something of a whim (for me), so I’m really locking in some hardcore stuff to take shape over the next 2.5 months! It seems like fortuitous timing to sync with my return from vacation and pivot into a new chapter with the start of a new job on Monday. Someone remind me on day 23 that I did this to myself. 🙃

That about covers it for now, but I trust there will be a lot of content in the coming 75 days or so!