The 75 Hard rules, written out plainly

The rules fit in a paragraph. Follow a diet with no alcohol and no cheat meals. Do two 45 minute workouts, one of them outdoors. Drink a gallon of water, which is about 3.8 litres. Read ten pages of a non fiction book. Take a progress photo. Do all five every day for 75 days, and if you miss any part of any day, you restart from day one.

What generates the endless online arguments is everything the paragraph does not say. Which diet? Frisella’s answer is that you pick one and follow it, which people find unsatisfying. Does an audiobook count? No, by the stated rules. Does a walk count as a workout? It counts if it is 45 minutes of deliberate activity, and the outdoor one is meant to be outdoors regardless of weather, which is the point rather than a bug. Do the workouts need to be separated? Yes, by at least three hours.

This page writes out each requirement, then goes through the edge cases in the order they actually come up: illness, travel, injury, two workouts in one day, water measured in cups, and what counts as reading if the book is a manual.

It also states clearly which of those answers are official and which are community consensus, because a lot of pages present the second as the first.

Outline

Status: outline. The introduction above is finished copy. Everything below is the section plan for the full draft, targeted at about 1 500 words.

1. The five requirements. Each one written out, with the exact wording.
2. The reset rule. What triggers it, and what does not.
3. Diet. What “a diet” means here, and the no cheat meal clause.
4. The two workouts. Length, separation, and what the outdoor one is for.
5. Water, reading and photos. Units, formats and the questions that come up weekly.
6. Edge cases. Illness, injury, travel and time zones, with official versus community answers marked.
7. Before you start. The three checks worth doing, including the medical one.