75 Hard Challenge— Benefits at Day 29

The art of building mental toughness

For most of my life, I’ve sat on the sidelines.

A bag of Cheetos in one hand and a can of coke to wash down the taste of salty cheese and self-loathing in the other — I’ve watched as people with more mental strength than I ever had go out and achieve their fitness goals.

As a lover of philosophy, I’ve always struggled with my own double standard of obsessively pursuing the question of “how to live” — while simultaneously being unable to exert any control whatsoever over my own lifestyle choices.

I’d gained all the mental gear — and had no idea.

It was time for a change. With a baby on the way, faced with the question of what kind of dad I wanted to be, I came to the conclusion that I had to purge the mental weakness once and for all.

If I was going to answer the question of how to live — it would need to be through action — not theory.

I came across the 75 Hard by Andy Frisella — and immediately knew I had to try it. It was the only challenge I’ve ever seen that wasn’t primarily focused on weight loss, but on building mental toughness.

These are the rules:

1. Follow a diet (No cheat meals, no alcohol)
2. 2 x 45 minute workouts every single day — one must be outside
3. Drink a gallon of water (3.7 litres)
4. Read 10 pages of a non-fiction book (no audiobooks)
5. Take a progress picture

Fail ANYTHING, start over.

29 days ago, I made the commitment to finish this challenge. So far it has been harder than I imagined and pushed me to my limits — but already the mental shifts which have taken place have been huge.

Here are 5 massive benefits I’ve already gained from doing the challenge:

1. I’m the lightest I’ve been in years
   Every time I’ve attempted to lose weight in the past, I’ve lost maybe 6 or 7 pounds and then yo-yo’d straight back up to my baseline. Just a month in, I’ve lost more than 11 pounds of fat and reached the lowest weight I’ve ever seen on my scales.
2. It doesn’t even feel difficult anymore
   At the start, drinking a gallon of water felt like a violation of my human rights. I was effectively waterboarding myself. Now I drink it without a second thought. If it was a requirement for survival that everybody drank a gallon a day, or worked out twice, nobody would struggle or find it particularly impressive. It would just be the norm. Your standards determine how easy or difficult anything is.
3. I’m procrastinating less
   Repeatedly doing hard things every day means that hard things are no longer hard — in any area of life. If I see something needs doing in the house, I’m far more likely to sacrifice comfort to get it done — it’s just gradually becoming second nature.
4. I respect and trust myself more
   Being unreliable to yourself is difficult. You have a deep internal distrust of your own ability to act which makes it hard to plan — and even harder to feel any kind of self respect. The more I prove to myself that I can depend on myself, the more inner peace I feel.
5. I’m excited for the future
   It turns out that a challenge like the 75 hard — if followed properly — is a catapult towards real self development. You can’t help but develop yourself at an insane rate in order to deal with the new expectations you place on yourself. I’m less than half way through the challenge and I already feel like a completely different person. I can finally build momentum in life, do the things I know are good for me and become more like the man I’d like to be.

For anyone exhausted by their own lack of self control like I was — or their morbid addiction to comfort, the 75 Hard really is the silver bullet for getting you out of it.

It makes you reliable.

It makes hard things comfortable.

And the fact you’ll probably lose more weight than you’ve ever been capable of losing is just a by-product of the new person you’ll become.