Tomorrow is my last day of 75 Hard. What an amazing personal project! I’m so thrilled to have gotten through this program, even though it will have taken me 131 days to get all the way to 75 complete days (my first day was January 1, 2024).
Remember the rules? If you mess/miss anything in the list of daily must-dos, you have to start over from Day 1. And on Day 48 of my first try, I missed taking my progress photos. And then I had to travel and then it was time for my colonoscopy, which kind of screwed with my daily shit, so to speak.
So I started again on February 26th, and voila! I did it!
Some of you have asked me about what I personally did during this program and what my days looked like, so I thought I’d just show you the rules again and how I worked the program during these last few months:
1. Two 45-minute workouts per day (one of them must be outdoors): The key here is to get my ass up early as shit…honestly for everything in this plan, but mainly for working out or I would NEVER be able to get two 45-minute workouts in per day. My first workout is always, always soon after waking (and after yawning, stretching, peeing, taking my thyroid meds, and weighing myself…and quickly after figuring some other things out, I discovered I needed to read my 10 pages and take my progress pics right before working out as well). By the way, my alarm goes off at 4am, okay? Once I figured this shit out, I got into a routine. So yeah, the first workout is always a workout video. I am used to workout videos and find them so much like having a personal trainer right there with me in the room. The cool thing about workout videos is that you can do them pretty much anywhere - in your bedroom, living room, in a hotel room, outside, at the gym, wherever you have a little bit of space! And YouTube is a freaking MIRACLE of technology when it comes to anything you want to do, right? So, I’ve found a million and one workouts. I’m following a few instructors in particular. I have weights and bands and a mat at home and my first workout consists of a 30+ minute high-intensity and/or strength-focused video PLUS a 15-minute stretch and mobility video. My second workout, which is supposed to be at LEAST 3 hours after your first workout, is always a good, long dog walk. I have to do this every day anyway, and it freaking COUNTS. And it’s aways so very good for my soul. And I’ve learned how to walk the dog in the rain, ha! She hates it, but. we have also done a LOT of rain cloud dodging as well. Boom. Workouts done.
2. Take a progress pic every day: I learned to do this right before turning on the workout videos first thing. It’s now routine. It’s funny because the progress pic seems to be the easiest thing for people to forget because it takes all of 30 seconds to do and if you don’t think about it, it can just slip right out of your mind (and that’s how I screwed up the first time!). But the progress pics turned out to be THE biggest motivating factor in this whole deal! I’ll tell you why. It was probably around Day 35 when my motivation started to wane. I was wondering what the hell this was doing. I wasn’t seeing much movement on the scale and I was thinking that it was a lot of freaking work for nothing. But then I decided to scroll back through my photos and look at my progress pics comparing Day 1 to Day 35. I must have had a little bit of forethought about my pics because every day I take a straight-on full-length photo, a side view full-length photo, and a back photo using a full-length mirror and my reverse camera. I also have a dumb little app on my phone that makes collages so I could do a true side-by-side comparison of each angle. Now, the first one I did was the straight on, and I didn’t see much progress between Days 1 and 35, but then I got to the side view. And I’ll be DAMNED if I didn’t see something that amazed the HELL out of me. See, I thought that being a 56-year-old post-menopausal, colon cancer survivor with a bajillion gut issues just meant that I’d have a rounded belly for the rest of my life. That’s just a given after all of that trauma, right? But miracle of miracles…my stomach was going down and getting flatter. I’d lost maybe 6 or 7 pounds at that point, but my stomach looked like a different person’s! I was so blown away that I posted an anonymous photo on an anonymous website discussion board and got many, many comments and affirmations and I was so freaking excited and that was all I needed to keep going! And even when I blew it and had to start over, I wasn’t mad AT ALL because I knew that the longer I kept up this plan, the better I was going to get!
3. Drink 1 gallon of water per day: You may or may not remember me writing about this saying there’s no way I can drink a gallon of water per day and that it’s probably unhealthy, even, to do so. Well, as it turns out, I have been drinking at LEAST four of my 32 oz Yeti tumbler of water because I now crave water so much. And 4 X 32 oz = 128 oz = 1 GALLON. So there you go. I don’t think I really need to write much more about this other than I have some quirks about ice water after going through a chemotherapy treatment that made me highly sensitive to cold drinks. The bottom line is, I’ve fallen back in love with ice water after I thought I’d never drink cold drinks again. That means that I’m changing! And yes, cancer is part of my history, but it’s NO LONGER MY STORY!!! See how wild this program is?! It’s changed so many aspects of my life in 131 short days!
4. Follow any diet you want, but stick to it - NO cheat meals and NO alcohol: So this is also an interesting aspect of this challenge. 75 Hard is NOT a diet, per se, though you have to put yourself on an eating plan. But you pick and choose whatever plan you want. So, if you want to lose weight, your option could be a calorie deficit, you could go vegan if you want, or choose a plan that will help you gain weight and build muscle if that’s what you want. It can be ANY diet as long as you’re not eating JUNK and consuming ALCOHOL. So first of all, because I think it’s honestly the most important thing, you know I have lots and lots and lots of thoughts about alcohol, right? I looovvved alcohol. My dog is named after an alcoholic cocktail. My Instagram handle includes a reference to alcohol! My WiFi password is bubbly-related! I have been a boozer since high school. And I’ve tried to do things here and there to test myself to see if I had a problem. And the answer was always, “kinda.” But that never really stopped me from drinking, even after short stints of abstinence here and there. Not even cancer treatment made me quit since my team of doctors all said, “Continue to live your life and enjoy a little!” Until now. And my further research on food being medicine and how alcohol is a known GROUP 1 carcinogen. It is proven to cause cancer. And look, I’ve decided to give my body the best fighting chance to avoid a recurrence or a new cancer. So there you go. My last drop of alcohol consumption was on December 30, 2023. Done and done. Forever. Goodbye. And then that takes me to the FOOD portion of this diet. And I had to ask myself what I wanted to accomplish. Did I want to lose weight? Sure. A little. I wasn’t super heavy in the first place, but man, I was out of shape!! So yeah, dropping a few pounds was a good idea, but honestly, I wanted to build muscle too! And I researched how to do that. And my biggest takeaway has been really increasing my protein while staying in a calorie deficit. So. I’ve done intermittent fasting before to a pretty impressive success. And I know how to be in a calorie deficit. I’ve used my fitbit app to track my food for a while now. The biggest thing for me was the increase in protein. And it was actually pretty fun to figure out - much like a puzzle to increase protein and decrease calories. You may know that I’ve already cut red meat and any processed meats out of my diet, so fish and chicken and a newfound interest in legumes, cottage cheese, greek yogurt and protein powders was formed. I found lots and lots of fantastic recipes online and loaded up on delicious veggies and…oh my gosh, since I cut out any processed sugary-sweet foods (minus a macaron here and there) fruit has never tasted so delicious! I’ll have to delve deeper into a What I Ate in a Day type stuff, but I hope you get the gist. As of today, I’ve lost 21 lbs and am starting to see some really nice muscle definition in my arms, shoulders, back (especially!), legs, and the abs are slowly coming along nicely. I will absolutely keep going with my new healthy diet. I LOVE it. I can’t stress it enough…I ADORE IT. Food is fuel. Food is medicine. Food is life. So no more mistreating myself with poison!!
5. Read 10 pages of a personal development book daily: This is another requirement I realized early on that I have to do early or the day will slip away and I’ll try to read before I go to sleep and actually fall asleep while reading. So I’ve been reading my books upon wake-up and right before I take my progress pics and do my first workout. The cool thing is I’m learning. Every. Single. Day. I mean, who doesn’t want to read about how you can give yourself a better life? I’m also learning about others - and why they are the way they are, ya know? During 75 Hard, I finished five books - books about how to live the best possible life, happiness, productivity, relationships and journaling. If you’re interested, I can add links, but I know I’ve referenced the concepts here and there and linked some of the books. There are a couple of books I didn’t enjoy, probably because one of them was totally self-indulgent of the author and it was obvious and annoying and now I think differently of this person/celebrity, and that bums me out. And the other one was about how to get super-duper focused and I feel like it made me anxious because I’m not there yet and kept getting fidgety and agitated while I read. But I’m still learning!
So THAT’S the gist of the program. I could go on for days and days and days and I likely will, because there are additional levels of 75 Hard that I think I’m going to take on. I knew I would be able to finish this program eventually, but I never, ever thought I’d be so excited about it and want to continue on!!
So tomorrow I will celebrate and then I’m moving on to the next steps in this new life of mine.
I’m so proud of myself!
xo,
GS
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