Are extreme diet and exercise challenges worth attempting?
Intense health and fitness programmes are all over social media at the moment, but are they right for you? We talk to the experts about the risks and rewards.
Extreme lifestyle challenges have boomed on social media, with people turning to them as a way to quickly boost their health and fitness. Perhaps the best-known example is the viral 75 Hard Challenge – a 75-day diet and exercise programme whose hashtag has amassed a cool couple of billion views.
These sorts of programmes go big on discipline, encouraging you to overhaul your diet while also exercising each day over a set period of time, often with no rest or ‘cheat’ days allowed.
Claiming to get you positive, long-term results for short-term effort, these regimes can feel tempting – especially at the start of the year when many of us are refocussing on our health.
But should you commit to one? Seasoned sports dietitian Renee McGregor thinks there are a few questions you should ask yourself in order to decide.
Trigger warning: Please note there is mention of disordered eating and disordered exercise below.
‘Why do I want to do the challenge?’
It’s important to interrogate your goals and motivation, says McGregor. “As a sports dietician, one of the first things I ask a new client is what they want to achieve. Is it about getting fitter? Are they hoping to do something like run a race or join a team? Or is it body composition led – for example wanting to have a certain aesthetic?”
“I’m very cautious when it comes to the latter and need to work out if they legitimately need to reduce body fat, or whether it’s more that they’re feeling a bit sluggish.
“An issue I have with lots of these extreme challenges is they are selling a false goal, often to people who are vulnerable – individuals who don’t feel confident in their bodies and people who already have body image issues or are on the borderline of disordered eating or disordered exercise.
“People are made to feel that they will be transformed as a person, but it doesn’t usually work that way. Being thinner won’t suddenly make us more successful, more confident or more intelligent.”
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‘Will a restrictive diet actually support my fitness goals?’
Many hard challenges focus on restricting your food intake to create a calorie deficit. When this is done in conjunction with rigorous daily exercise, it can become problematic, says McGregor.
‘Move more, eat less’ is a phrase we’re all familiar with, and these challenges seem to champion that widely accepted ethos. But research has shown the way our bodies work mean things aren’t quite that simple, explains the expert.
“The human body is fundamentally hardwired to avoid threat and doesn’t want to be in starvation mode or have a massive deficit, because that’s a threat to us and our nervous system. So, it will do everything in its power to try and stop that from happening.”
McGregor explains that restricting your eating while upping your exercise efforts – especially if it’s high-intensity – may well be putting your body under unhealthy levels of stress, causing it to initiate panic mode.
“Even when we’re not doing anything active, we’re burning energy all the time, so when you add in training, that’s an additional demand on the body. If you’re not fuelling your body properly for that, you’ll get to the point where your body can’t respond to the training stimulus. It will almost start to rebel. So, where you’d expect to get leaner and thinner, actually, your body might start actively holding on to more fat.”
Of course, that’s not to say you should be eating as much as you can – following a well-balanced diet is the best way to support your physical activity.
“Carbohydrates and protein are still very much the friend of anybody who wants to be physically active. Eating carbs regularly throughout the day will not only support your training, but also support the hormonal pathways that are needed to get good progression. Protein, meanwhile, is essential for the recovery phase and other nutrients like iron, calcium, vitamin D, magnesium and essential fatty acids are all important too.
“Fundamentally, the athlete diet is not that dissimilar to a healthy plate – with vegetables and lots of fibre.”
Recipes that pack both carbs and protein
‘Could hard challenges do me more harm than good?’
“My job is to help people to achieve their fitness targets, but that is done by fuelling yourself properly through a healthy diet and building on your fitness steadily.”
If you create a big calorie deficit while doing lots of intensive exercise, you aren’t going to reach your fitness goals and it’s highly likely you’re going to cause problems for yourself further down the line, says McGregor.
“Rather than chasing instant gratification through a hard challenge, you need to build your ‘training age.’ For example, with running you might start with doing a couch to 5K and then after doing that for a while, move on to a few park runs, go up to 10K and then slowly but steadily increase your distance. Maybe five to seven years down the line you might start doing ultra marathons.”
If you go from nothing to doing high-intensity exercise every day your body won’t be used to the demands you’re making of it and you’ll be at risk of injury and long-term ill health, says the dietitian.
“I’ve had quite a few people come to me who’ve gone from doing no exercise to doing three or four ultras within a year of taking up running. The reason they presented to me is because they were either injured or so exhausted that they couldn’t compete anymore. A lot of them had chronic fatigue symptoms.
“You must lay the right foundations. It’s like building a house: if you don’t get the foundations right, the house is going to fall over.”
The impacts of completing an extreme challenge programme might not be immediately obvious – they could come long after the challenge is over.
“Your body will always try and patch you up and keep you going for as long as possible. But there will come a point where it can’t do it any longer. You might keep getting recurrent stress fractures or feel like you’ve got chronic fatigue, and this could well be because you’ve put your body under so much stress previously.”
Plus, attempting an unrealistic challenge – one we’re not physically or mentally equipped for and ultimately can’t complete – isn’t going to do wonders for our mood or mental outlook either. When we’re forced to give up, it opens the door for feelings of failure and not being good enough. That’s despite the challenge having been unsuitable for us and unsustainable from the off, says the dietician.
Instead, McGregor says we should “take things slowly. You don’t want to just attach yourself to a trend only for 18 months later to realise that it’s had negative consequences.
“Build a sustainable lifestyle, follow a diet that’s healthy but doesn’t feel restrictive and build up to doing lots of types of movement. Balance any intensive training in your routine with stretching and supportive exercise such as pilates and yoga. Go at your own pace and don’t focus on what an influencer is prescribing online – they may mean well but it doesn’t mean they are experts on the subject.”
Please note: Always speak to medical experts before attempting a new regime.
If you have been affected by any issues raised above, help and support is available
Originally published January 2024
