I Just Completed 75 HARD & The Results Are Unimpressive

What do you think would happen if you cut out all sugar, fast food, and alcohol from your diet for 75 days straight? What if you also exercised for 90 minutes each day and drank 3+ litres of water?

You’d become a shredded god, lose a bunch of weight, and get super fit and strong… right?

Wrong.

You would probably just look slightly more toned and lose a little bit of your love handles – at least that’s what happened to me.

Check out this picture. If I didn’t label the before and after shots, you would be hard pressed to tell the difference.

Here Are My Stats:

Before -> After
- Weight: 85 -> 87kg
- Waist: 88 -> 90cm
- Biceps: 37 -> 37cm
- Chest: 100 -> 106cm
- Neck: 40 -> 40cm
- Thighs: 56 -> 61cm

I gained weight. This isn’t unexpected, given the fact I was weight training most days, but I was also doing a lot of cardio.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any data on my body fat ratios/composition, but I can see and feel a reduction in fat and a gain in muscle mass. I feel stronger, fitter, and healthier. I am more energetic throughout the day and feel ‘younger’ than I did prior to starting the challenge.

So Why Am I Not Impressed?

Given my years of training, my results are about what I expected. I know that fad diets and fancy exercise systems simply do not work - they may provide impressive short-term results but are ultimately unsustainable over the long term.

The advertisements suggest that they are ‘all you need’ to look like a supermodel. This is a lie. Those models have a staff at hand to cook for, and train, them every single day – resources that most of us simply do not enjoy.

What this boils down to is a false expectation.

You would think that 75 HARD would make a massive difference, but it simply won’t. Long term changes happen slowly. It requires years of dedication to get and maintain a healthy body.

The problem is that this is a tough sell.

I wish I could take a pill that would cut all my body fat.
I wish that 20 minutes a day on a fancy piece of exercise equipment would get me ripped.
I wish there was a secret way to stay fit with minimal effort.

But there isn’t.
There is only slow progress, small gains, and hard work.

I am sorry to be a downer on this one, but it’s the truth. How many diets have you tried? How many worked?

Exactly.

A good diet can be undertaken for the rest of your life. Remember that the next time you are considering going on a juice fast or a cleanse. How long can you reasonably expect to sustain it?

Realistically, those diets are bound to fail. You cannot sustain a fast, nor can you sustain a diet consisting of one or two items exclusively – not without getting very sick.

The catch is that those diets do provide impressive short-term results. Which makes sense, if you effectively starve yourself for three weeks and workout a bunch, you will see a reduction in weight and a loss of water retention.

But what happens in week four?

When you finally break, your body scrambles to protect itself from another flash diet. You gain all that weight back and more.

Here’s the thing, your body does not know that you are choosing to diet. It doesn’t know that you are living in the 21st century and have access to more calories than you could possibly need. No, it thinks you have entered a time of famine (why else would you not be consuming enough food?) and starts eating itself to survive.

So, when you start eating normally again, it makes sure that you are safe from another environmental famine by stacking back on the fat, often more than you lost during your diet.

Thus, you put that diet down as a failure, find a new one, and repeat the cycle.

Want to lose weight, gain muscle, and get fit?

Here is what actually works:

1- Eat less calories than you burn. An app like My Fitness Pal can track your macros, exercise, and daily activities, contrast that data against your demographics and then tell you how much you are going to gain or lose. It isn’t perfect, but it’s a great start. Most serious body sculptors will tell you that 80% of your results happen in the kitchen. I believe them.

2- Cut (or reduce) sugar, fast foods, soft drinks, and alcohol. All the above are high in calories and low in nutrients. You are basically consuming them for mouth pleasure. Delicious in the short term, disastrous in the long term.

3- Increase your protein intake. Most people do not eat anywhere near enough protein. There are ratios that the pro’s use (again see My Fitness Pal) but the simplest answer is to just eat a bit more of the following with each meal: eggs, meat, and soya.

4- Drink way more water. Like protein, most people simply do not drink enough water. Doing so has multiple benefits, the least of which will be a feeling of fullness. You won’t have as much room to eat trash if you are drinking water. Fill up two 1.5 L bottles of water every morning and finish them by the end of the day.

5- Walk more. Walking is extremely underrated. I use a walking pad when I am writing. This gives me an extra 1-2 hrs of exercise a day. It is a low impact, low energy option, to keep your body moving and thus burning extra calories.

6- Exercise daily. I put this last because it is honestly the least important aspect for body composition change. Exercise is any activity that gets you moving. It doesn’t have to take place in a gym, and it doesn’t have to be boring. In fact, it should be fun, that way you will want to do it again and again.

Some alternative exercise options include dancing, rock climbing, bush walking, hacky sack, swimming, martial arts, or playing with your kids.

That said, if you want to get seriously strong, you will need to lift.

The Benefits of 75 HARD

In my mind, the benefits of 75 HARD are predominantly mental.

It is not easy to exercise daily. Cutting out sugar, fast food, and alcohol involves a lot of craving management.

Fitting it all into your day requires a significant level of organisational foresight.

Doing all of this for 75 days straight takes dedication, willpower, and continuous justification. Both to yourself, as well as those around you. You will be forever saying ‘sorry, I have to exercise again,’ or ‘I can’t eat that,’ or ‘no thank you,’ to all offers of drinks and desserts.

But it’s worth it.

At the end of the 75 days, you will have completed something that most people would deem impossible. You will feel proud of yourself for trying and completing the challenge. You will be forever remembering that time you took ownership of your life by imposing your willpower over your lesser desires.

With those gains, who cares whether or not you can see significant changes in your body?

Proportional Gains

With all that said, I was already exercising a lot and had a reasonable diet prior to starting 75 HARD.

So, although the challenge imposed a restriction upon my lifestyle, those restrictions were not that much different than my normal – this may account for the less than impressive results.

If someone with a poor diet and a non-existent exercise regime was to complete the challenge, their results would be significantly different. Provided that they could complete the challenge in the first place.

I guess the rewards will mirror the difficulty! Besides, it is called 75 HARD for a reason.

Do you want to do the 75 HARD challenge? In this Skill Share course you will develop the discipline needed to successfully complete the 75- HARD challenge.