Day 75! What a journey
I can’t lie, the past 75 days have gone so quickly and I feel like I have gained so much (except for weight, thankfully that’s gone down).
Without a big trauma dump, I lost my dad suddenly at the start of 2025 and as often happens in grief, everything that wasn’t essential fell by the wayside and I went into survival mode. That meant neglecting my fitness that I’d worked hard to build, being inconsistent at best with my diet and allowing bad habits to creep in. I was still working out and eating somewhat okay - but I felt like trash.
By the start of 2026, I’d pretty much only exclusively wear baggy clothes, hadn’t run in almost 6 months and was struggling with what I now know is OCD after therapy and a diagnosis.
After starting to get back into healthier habits in February, I started this challenge on 1 March and now here we are. I’m really proud of my progress and the things I’ve achieved in that time are so cool to me. Since starting I’ve:
- started going to parkrun again, which was once a staple of my weekends
- ran a sub 55 min 10k
- deadlifted 100kg
- hiked a few big hills with friends
- fit into a pair of jeans that when they arrived looked like they could only fit my big toe in
- completed therapy and now have a name for all of the weird thoughts and compulsions in my daft brain
- lost 5kg and taken my BMI from on the cusp of overweight to right in the middle of healthy, but that’s only one win of many
I want to lose another maybe 5lbs, so my plan is to keep to the challenge until then - I’m in a WhatsApp group with some lovely people from this sub who are on about day 50, so I’ll tag onto their challenge now. After that, I’ll begin a maintenance/reverse diet phase with a lot of the workouts/water elements still the same!
It’s nice to not still feel like my head is always stuffed full of cotton wool and someone is running around in there banging pots and pans constantly. I attribute a lot of that to this challenge.