100 Hard Week 1
It's been eight hard days of hell
Today being Sunday is the beginning of Day 9, so it’s a very good day to recount my first week (technically 8 days, or 9 if you count just exercise) of my 100 Hard torture regime I have been subjecting myself to.
I’m surprised I survived the first week of this self inflicted hell.
I managed to walk at least 20,000 steps every single day of the last eight days, but if you include Friday, it’s been nine full days of walking 20,000 steps or more.
The Routine
5:30am → Get up
5:30am - 6am → Brush my teeth, bathe, get dressed and put on my workout gear
6am - 7am → Walk on the treadmill for an hour
First Period (7am - 9am) →
Lift weights: I do five reps of the weights above my head, trying to lift them by the side, and hanging my arm down behind my neck and straightening my arm, then ten reps of basic bicep curls.
Take progress photos: I take front, side, and back full body shots, and same for face closeup shots.
Eat breakfast if it’s an eating day
Read 4 pages of my chosen novel — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count
Write 600 words of my own novel (name is a secret for now, but the tentative title has something to do with cupcakes 🧁)
9am → Walk on the treadmill again for 35 minutes
After each walk, I lift weights again.
Second Period (9am - 12pm) →
Work
12pm → Walk for 35 minutes
Lift weights after
Third Period (12pm - 3pm) →
Eat my one meal if it’s an OMAD day.
Run errands.
More work.
3pm → Walk for 35 minutes
Lift weights after
Fourth Period (3pm - 6pm) →
Work.
6pm → Walk for 35 minutes
Lift weights after
Fifth Period (6pm - 9pm) →
Eat dinner if it’s an eating day.
Write about my day in my journal.
Track what I did in my bullet journal.
9pm → Walk for 35 minutes
Lift weights after
Sixth Period (9pm - 10pm) →
Plan the next day
Get ready for bed.
Ideally I am in bed and fast asleep by 10 or 10:30 at the latest.
What’s going well?
The walking works.
The fasting works.
I’m not so sure the weight lifting works, but perhaps it’s too early to tell.
The first few days were both easy and hard.
Easy because I had high excitement for it, I was ready to get started, I was mentally hyped, but hard because I had low physical tolerance for how much sheer work it was to just get through it.
There were several really hard days, like the day before yesterday, when I was so tired that I skipped two workouts, and was in serious danger of not hitting the goal.
By 8pm I had just 12,000 steps, and I was panicking, but I forced myself to get on the treadmill and walk for an hour and a half, which was hell.
I learned my lesson, and I’m not skipping workouts no matter how tired I am, because making it up later is so much worse.
Staying off social media has been surprisingly easy. I just set Screen Time limits of one minute on each of my apps, and now whenever I open them, the screen just locks before I can get sucked in.
What isn’t going well?
I was a bit surprised by the things that ended up being hard, because going in, I had my own idea of what I thought was going to be difficult, and so in hindsight, some of the hardest things I realise, were psychological or mental barriers as opposed to physical barriers where I was afraid that I just wasn’t capable.
What I have learned so far this week is that I am physically capable of walking 20,000 steps every single day without feeling like it’s killing me or without it being some horrifically superhuman effort although it is a lot of effort it is a lot of strain, but it’s well within my capability which is something that I wasn’t sure about going in.
I had a lot of trepidation on the first day, and I felt physically nervous throughout the day because I wasn’t sure if I could do it or if I would be fighting for my life every single second.
Something I found so difficult to do was to take the progress photo every morning, just from a place of feeling self-conscious, and then also seeing the result, and not being happy with it, but having to ignore that either way because I’m going through a process, and I just have to keep going if I want to eventually get results that I’m happy with.
The other thing that I found was the biggest challenge was journaling, but this one was partially my fault, because I had brought out my journal for the challenge before hand, then promptly mislaid it, so I have been writing my journal entries on scraps of paper to be compiled later.
I really regret not measuring my body parts at the beginning, even though I did buy a body tape measure beforehand.
I was just so exhausted that I forgot, but I will be measuring myself this week since I’m just one week in, to have an idea of what my measurements were prior, and how much I’m losing, not just in terms of weight and pounds, but in terms of inches and dimensions.
What needs improvement?
The biggest revelation so far, is that the hardest challenge to conquer is what I do with my time in between the walks, rather than the walks themselves, which are monotonous and tedious, but definitely doable.
Initially, after each exercise I was so exhausted that in the two and a half hours between my exercises, I just didn’t have the energy to do anything else.
I would just lie on the couch or collapse onto the bed, and I felt like I couldn’t do anything else, which defeats a huge part of the purpose of my 100 Hard challenge, because the goal isn’t just to lose weight, it’s to make massive progress in other areas that have stagnated for me for too long, like my writing.
The only thing I was able to get done besides diet, fasting, and exercise, was reading the book Dream Count, and even that was initially difficult, but got easier with time.
The other huge mental block I had was writing my novel.
This, I was most scared of because writing used to come so easily to me in the past. I wrote so many stories. I launched Nigerian Fiction when I was a teenager in college. I was the editor of the school literary magazine The Roar in Loyola.
I wrote my original blog for years and years, and yet with this novel, because it’s so personal to me, I’ve struggled so much to get this out of my mind where it’s a very rich and very well developed world, onto paper, and still show the mental imagery that I have about the story.
But I did find that writing right after reading helped somewhat, and I don’t know why that is. I suppose there’s some connection there.
In the past I had tried to break my writing goal down but that did not help.
I even made the goal as simple as just write fifty words a day, and that did not help, so to my pleasant surprise, this week, I made some progress with that mental barrier, because I have indeed written six hundred words each day, although because I had to be out of town for two of those days, that part of the schedule did break down .
I ended up not writing and not reading while I was travelling though I was able to catch up on the reading on the way back, but I wasn’t able to catch up on the writing so I have a deficit of writing that I have to catch up today so I can go into the next week without having a backlog.
Also, I absolutely need to sleep more.
Okay, so is it working?
Despite the flawed execution, it seems to be working.
I’ve had to ramp up my focus, discipline, and just force myself to do the things on the schedule regardless of how I felt.
That alone is a marked improvement for me and how I operate in life.
Week 1 Results
Over the last 8 days, I have lost 9.9 lbs 🎉🎉🎉
That’s an average of 1.24 lbs lost per day.
Once I find my journal and set up the bullet journal pages for this, I’ll try to think of more metrics to track.
The obvious ones are weight, sleep, water intake, etcetera, but if you can think of anything else (my mood would probably be a good idea) I should keep an eye on or try to measure during this process, let me know.
💛,
Lotanna
That's amazing progress! Keep going, I'm rooting for you 💪🏾✨
you’re doing really well. it gets easier in week three. keep going!