Review of The 75-Hard Challenge

Completing the 75-Hard Challenge was one of my New Year’s Resolutions this year. The combination of diet, lifestyle and self-help aspects felt like a good route to take for kick-starting my post-partum recovery. Here’s my review of the challenge.

For those who are not familiar with this challenge, participants have to drink a gallon of water, stick to a diet, take a progress photo, read 10 pages of a non-fiction book, abstain from alcohol and complete 2x 45 minute workouts every day for 75 days. If any element is missed on any day, you have to go back to the beginning.

Spoiler alert: We did not complete the full 75 days. But there are a lot of good reasons for this, which I want to delve into in more detail.

My husband and I decided to start the challenge at when our little one was six weeks old. We are almost-vegan so decided to focus on clean, healthy eating and avoid processed foods. We have two very energetic dogs that require a lot of exercise, easily 90 minutes each day of brisk walking or jogging. So we thought we had the two most challenging aspects in the bag already!

Little did we know that we were both embarking on a journey of reflection and self-discovery, rather than re-affirming our commitment to live a healthy and active lifestyle.

The Daily Photograph

I went into this thinking that the daily photograph would be a formality. I told myself that the purpose of engaging with this challenge was to get my health and fitness back on track, and I had no expectations for my body to “bounce back” to how it looked pre-pregnancy.

So I was incredibly surprised by my own reluctance to have my photo taken on day one, and by how resistant I was to look at that photograph. This really highlighted to me that I had not made peace with all the changes my incredible body had made in order to grow my beautiful baby. Cue several days of cathartic journaling to get to the bottom of this, and lots of affirmations to change my mindset!

A Gallon of Water a Day?!

A gallon is defined differently in other parts of the world, but in the UK it equates to just over 4.5 litres. That is a lot of water. Though we probably could drink 4.5 litres of tea per day!

As an active, breast-feeding mum, I was drinking over 3 litres of water per day before the challenge, with cups of tea and a big smoothie in addition to this. It was not overly challenging to fit in an extra couple of glasses of water per day.

My husband, however, was not even close to this volume. He found it a real struggle to consistently drink this quantity of water, and found that he was up through the night going to the toilet – not ideal!

As a healthcare professional, I think our experience here highlights the fact that everyone is different, and it’s therefore very hard to be so prescriptive about the volume of water someone should drink or the number of calories they should consume in a day.

When it comes to fluids, drinking to thirst is usually the best measure of adequate hydration. More is not always better!

Alcohol

Having very recently been pregnant, and now breast-feeding my baby, I have not consumed alcohol for a very long time! Continuing to abstain was not really a problem for me. I am beginning to wonder if I will ever want to return to consuming alcohol, as it has been so easy to go without it.

George has also taken a small whisky only very occasionally, and it was no big issue for him to go without this for the duration of the challenge.

Clean Eating

We decided to eat very cleanly and avoid processed foods altogether as our “diet.” In many ways, this made my job in the kitchen so much easier. Limiting my ingredients to fresh fruits and vegetables, legumes, eggs and store-cupboard basics was strangely liberating.

I did a lot of big batch cooking: curries, chillis, bolognase and other such meals, which fed us for two or three consecutive dinners. This meant I only had to cook every few days, which was really handy when trying to fit this in around looking after the baby. I am going to continue to do this to help lighten the load!

Reading

I love books. I really enjoy reading. Though generally I prefer works of fiction, I definitely collect self-help books; I just hope that I will absorb the latter by osmosis!

I did not want to give up the time I devote to reading fiction in the evenings before bed, so I decided to do my self-help reading when the baby was having a feed. I was sat there anyway, I might as well do something productive!

During the 30 days that we stuck to the challenge, I worked my way through a book on self-care for new mums as well as a few books on managing difficult family relationships – all hugely helpful!

I have continued to read self-help titles, directed by the themes that come up with journaling. I would definitely recommend this to anyone struggling with any aspect of their life; it has been really enlightening!

Exercise

We are both very active, outdoorsy people and spent a lot of time on the land, tending to the animals and veg garden. So we really didn’t think 90 minutes of exercise per day would be a challenge at all.

However, that all rather depends on how one defines “exercise.” Two brisk 30+ minute walks with the dogs went a long way to achieving the daily target. But what about digging over a bed to plant potatoes? What about playing fetch with the dogs instead of going on a walk? We don’t really get “rest days,” though most people would want to factor that in.

Summary

Ultimately, we realised that we do pretty well with our diet and activity levels most of the time. The goal for both of us was health and fitness, and we didn’t feel that continuing with the challenge was adding anything in terms of these parameters.

Never having a little treat or an easier day / rest day seemed very contrived, and not really in keeping with forming good long-term habits.

However, the month that we did stick to the challenge did help us to make some positive changes to our routines, such as reading some non-fiction every day. And it certainly helped me to be kinder to myself and my body after all that it has been through!

Overall, it was well worth doing, even if not for the reasons that we had intended!