I want to start with a quote. Firstly, because it’s my favourite quote – but it also just so happens to really nicely sum up my journey with health habits.
Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
That quote is from Steve Jobs. It’s always resonated deeply with me.
There was no one moment where I sat down and said – right I need to transform my life.
And to transform my life, I’m now going to track foundational health habits because I know they are the base of the pyramid for me. I also happen to know exactly which habits to track – and once they are nailed, I will be a completely different person. Someone who is more confident, more capable, has better energy and is in better health. Oh, and I will also be able to completely change my physique.
Even though that would be the perfect story – it didn’t happen like that. I wasn’t able to connect the dots looking forward in that way – only looking backwards, after I’d been on that journey.
So, let’s start at the beginning. It actually started with me wrestling to get my relationship with alcohol under control. For a long time, alcohol was a very big handbrake on my life.
As I got into my forties, my hangovers were getting worse, and longer – despite cutting down my drinking. I was often tired, anxious and full of self doubt.
Here are a couple of examples of how this has affected my life.
I run two management meetings on a Monday morning. I used to dread them. I’d feel nervous, anxious and full of self doubt leading up to them. I just felt horrible about myself. I could literally feel my heart racing as I spoke – even just anticipating that I would need to speak. It was a really big hurdle I had to deal with every week.
Another area of my life that I found difficult was consistently sticking to a training program and to eat healthily. I felt like I had no control over whether I trained four times a week, or none at all. There was also a lot of bingeing going on with food – a lot of over eating, and eating ultra processed comfort foods. Overall, I found it very hard to be a disciplined person. This ate away at me. I desperately wanted to be a disciplined person – someone who could do what I said, and do what I wanted to do.
I’d tried to set all types of rules for myself with alcohol. No more than four drinks a week. No more than two drinks per day. Only on weekends. But, without fail, I always eventually failed. This happened hundreds of times.
One day, I finally had enough. I can remember it vividly. I had been out the night before with some friends and had four or five drinks. I had broken my rule of not having more than a couple of drinks per day AGAIN. As a result, I was feeling terrible the next morning. I decided at that moment that I needed to cut alcohol out of my life forever. It was the only way. I recalled someone’s advice on getting sober I had listened to recently – ‘the best drink not to have, is the first one’. That was the mentality I needed to adopt.
I printed out a thirty day calendar and stuck it on the fridge, where it was right in front of me every day. I went for a don’t break the chain strategy. Every day I didn’t drink, I put a tick against it. Eventually, seven days unbroken, turned into thirty days unbroken – and thirty days into sixty days. And the rest is history.
I was amazed at how much better I felt. The feelings of tiredness, anxiousness and self doubt didn’t completely go away. But, I had long periods where they weren’t there. I felt like a brand new person.
Importantly, my journey with giving up alcohol introduced me to a very important concept – the power of tracking a habit on a daily basis, and making sure it was in my awareness many times throughout the day.
So, that was sort of stage one of the journey with building foundational health habits – giving up alcohol.
The next stage was realising how important sleep is for me. When I had a few consecutive nights of poor sleep, I would get the same feelings of tiredness, self doubt and a lack of discipline that I felt with alcohol.
That’s when a light bulb went off. It wasn’t just the alcohol making me feel like this. It might have been more the alcohol which was causing poor sleep – and together they were a deadly combination. The more I looked into it, I learned that alcohol stops your body getting the quality and restorative sleep it needs [1]. This all started to make a lot of sense now.
So, I tackled sleep in the same way I did alcohol. I set a goal of six and a half hours sleep, and alongside my no alcohol tick, I also started to put a tick for achieving six and a half hours sleep.
I don’t have those tick sheets from back then, but I can remember finding it really hard to hit even only 30% consistency for the first month. My sleep was terrible. However, the next month this crept up to 40%. And then over the next few months, it edged into 50%. Again, all because of the daily tracking and the fact that it was in the front of my awareness every day. By being so aware of it, it was pushing me to figure out ways to get better and better over time, so I could hit my sleep goal more regularly.
And surprise, surprise. When I strung together a few nights of sleep over 6 and a half hours – I became less tired – less anxious – and I had less self doubt. I found it so much easier to stick to my training and to eat more healthily. I was becoming a different and more capable person.
And then I had a thought. This worked for alcohol and was starting to work for sleep. I’m starting to get more consistent with my training and nutrition. I’m really liking how much better I’m feeling, and how disciplined I’m becoming. I should do this for a few more habits that would be good for me – why not really push this as far as I can?
This led to me coming up with a bunch of other health habits that felt sensible to tackle. I bought a trusty moleskin lined notepad and made one page my own daily tick sheet for the month. This way, I could track a handful of habits each month – in the same way I did with alcohol and sleep.
(my first ever monthly health habit tick sheet!)
And the rest is history.
January 2024 is my 25th month of tracking a set of foundational health habits. Over time, they’ve changed quite a bit – both the habits and the targets I set myself. I’ve now settled on eight really strong foundational health habits – the ones which really move the needle for me.
I’ve also had to have several big mindset shifts over the last couple of years, and through trial and error, I’ve figured out strategies for being consistent with each of my habits. Again, all of this was very hard to predict. But, I can now look back and see how I was able to incrementally get to this point – eight foundational health habits that I can be consistent with.
The results have been awesome. I hardly ever feel tired and anxious nowadays. In fact, most of the time I feel great and have really good energy.
Most of the self doubt has gone and I’m a much more confident person – in all areas of my life. My work, my relationships, how comfortable I am with myself. It sounds silly, but I really like myself now.
My discipline with my training and nutrition is OFF THE CHARTS. In fact, I often tell people I live my life like an athlete – which sounds ridiculous on the face of it. Trust me, my performance is nowhere near the level of an athlete. But, my discipline and the way I live my life wouldn’t be out of place with the discipline you see amongst athletes.
As a result, I’ve transformed my physique by losing over 20 lbs, and reducing my body fat. I’ve gone from seeing no abs, to now 4 abs, and at my leanest, 6 abs. I’ve also improved a bunch of health markers along the way too.
So there you have it. This whole journey started with me just generally just feeling lousy about myself and my health.
I tackled alcohol first, which obviously had a big impact in my life. That led to me tackling another big one – sleep. From there, I used these learnings to start tackling other habits. And over time, these transformed into the eight foundational health habits I have today.
As I said at the start, I could never have predicted this journey. I can only now connect the dots looking backwards and just be forever grateful that I stumbled into this journey.
I know, hands down, I will track foundational health habits in my life forever. The change has just been too powerful and I never want to lose my grip on it. In fact, I just want to take things to the next level now.
I hope you find my journey inspiring and will consider starting your own journey of building foundational health habits into your life. It’ll be life changing, I promise.
Reach out if you need help, I’d love to help.
Notes:
[1] Effects of Alcohol on the Body: Data Insights for HRV, Sleep & More
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