Daniel Clough

One dude. Seven foundational health habits.

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The Daniel Clough Podcast

The Daniel Clough Podcast is now out on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, and anywhere else you listen to podcasts. 🎉

I’ve really gone down the rabbit hole on building foundational health habits into my life over the last couple of years.

In fact, this month is my 25th month of tracking them on a daily basis. Every day, I put a tick or a cross next to each habit. And at the end of every month, I look at my overall results and try to improve for the following month.

It’s been completely transformational. I’m a completely different human being. Someone who is more confident, more positive, more disciplined, looks healthier, and is healthier.

I’ve had to learn a ton along the way. I’ve had to shift my mindset to be able to build these habits. I’ve had to learn, through trial and error, the strategies to successfully build each one. And I’ve had to learn how to build a system of accountability around me.

So, I’m super excited to launch a podcast on exactly this topic. The Daniel Clough Podcast will delve deep into the power of building foundational health habits. I’m looking forward to continuing to document my own journey, and sharing strategies for how you can build foundational health habits into your own life.

If you’re up for some transformation in your life in 2024, please give it a listen!

Three episodes are live now (my journey with foundational health habits, introducing each of the eight habits and sharing my goals for 2024). And there will be weekly releases from here.

Enjoy it. And I’d love any feedback!

Cheers,
Daniel

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Daily Habits: Jan 2024 (Ooooh, look how the year started and a big announcement!)

My goals for my health habits this year are simple – triple down on the eight habits that I have. Nothing new.

Sleep and steps are still a bit of a struggle, and there’s plenty of room for improvement with the other six habits. Ultimately, I want all eight habits to be firing on all cylinders and above 80% consistency.

So, let’s see how January panned out:

(Click here for the full journey)

Miguel Herrera Win GIF - Find & Share on GIPHY

Yeah, I did pretty good. A super solid month, and a great start to the year. I’m particularly impressed with my sleep at 84% – given six of the last seven months have been under 80%.

The only downside is that I slipped up with my steps towards the end of the month, which pulled my consistency just below 80%. But, as I said above, I know steps are a challenge for me, and I’ll keep chipping away at it throughout 2024.

You’ll also notice that caffeine is unusually at 100%. That’s because I did a no caffeine challenge in January. Expect to hear more on that shortly. It was an interesting experiment for sure!

This year is going to be an epic year for my foundational health habits. As I always say, they are the base of the pyramid for me. When they’re in a good place, usually everything else in my life is in an excellent place. 2024 is for tripling down on them.

I’m looking forward to sharing more of my journey with these eight foundational habits, as well as strategies and tips that can help you build your own in 2024.

Until next month!

P.S Big announcement time. I have a brand new podcast coming very soon. It will be completely dedicated to building foundational health habits. Watch this space.

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BIG habits update (Nov, Dec & 2024!)

It’s been a while since I wrote a habit update.

Don’t worry, I haven’t fallen off the wagon. I have still been focusing on, and tracking my habits daily. Life just got in the way, and I didn’t get around to writing updates for November and December. In fact, I’m more committed than ever to nail down these eight health habits (see my thoughts on 2024 below).

I’ll cover November and December, and then what’s in store for 2024.

As a re-cap, I had a wobble in June, July and August. I improved things in September and October, and was looking to hold onto that in November.

Here’s how November and December played out:

There was a lot going on in November and December. I took two trips (Lisbon and Cyprus) in November and then we had the Christmas period. This meant quite a bit of time without my normal routine. For my trips and the Christmas period, I fell back to my usual holiday strategy of only tracking and holding myself accountable for four habits – alcohol, sleep, steps and water.

Overall, I’m happy-ish. On one hand, mostly green is good. On the other hand, I’m still struggling with sleep and steps. That’s not good, because with the exception of alcohol, are the most important habits. I have to get these under control. They will be my main focuses for Q1 – which nicely leads me to 2024!

As I thought about my focuses for 2024, I did briefly consider if I should add any new habits to the list. It’s very tempting. But, I came to the conclusion that instead, I need to TRIPLE DOWN on the eight health habits I already have.

These health habits are my foundation – the base of the pyramid. I think of them as an operating system. I know I’ll track them for the rest of my life.

When they are mostly green, I feel amazing. I’m confident, optimistic, disciplined and have good energy. I find it easy to get in a flow and be consistent with my training and nutrition – and anything else in life. When they start going orange and red, things start to unravel. I feel lousy, tired, anxious and pessimistic. And I find it hard to put together good weeks with my training and nutrition.

With that said, I’m happy to keep chipping away at nailing these eight health habits down. I want it to feel easy to hit 80% consistency for these eight habits.

The big ones to focus on for the next few months are sleep and steps. As for what specifically, it’s being more prepared.

Steps: When I leave it to chance, and later in the day, I almost always fail. So, I need to have a plan for how I will get my steps in for the day – preferably at least half of them early in the morning. If I can do this, I’ll hit 80% easily.

Sleep: This one is simple. I need to be more aware of what time I have to get up in the morning. And then I need to be more disciplined in the evening to go to bed at a time that safely allows for six and half hours sleep. Not rocket science. I’ve just been complacent recently.

I’m super excited to SMASH these habits in 2024. I’m already off to a flying start in January!

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A major setback (and how I will come back stronger)

I hurt my back in the gym this week. My initial reaction was one of frustration, because I’ve been here plenty of times before. This is going to mean a painful week of not doing much – followed by a couple of weeks of walking and then gently getting back into things. I’m probably six weeks away from training properly.

For a few hours following the injury, the frustration turned to anger. I was so pissed off with facing the reality of a setback. My mind started to go into a dark place. Is this going to turn into six months of pain, like I’ve experienced before?

But, then I surprised myself. I took a step back. I can’t let myself think like this. OK, it’s fine to feel sorry for myself for one day. But, that’s it. Now I have to take this situation by the scruff of the neck, think positive and move forward.

And that’s exactly what I’ve done. As I look back on how I’ve had to think about this setback, a framework became clear to me.

There’s always a silver lining

It sounds cheesy, but it’s true – there usually is a silver lining. Sometimes you just have to stop being pissed off to notice it.

I’ve been struggling to shake off some pain in my shoulder and hand recently. There’s not quite enough time between weights sessions to give them the rest they need. In the five days I’ve not been able to train, the pain has already reduced a lot. This period of rest is perhaps exactly what my body needed right now to shift these smaller injuries.

Take the learning

Every time I get an injury, I’m able to reflect and see why it happened. Whilst it’s frustrating not to notice in the moment, it becomes a learning moment that will make me stronger going forward.

This week, I switched my usual warm up for some back core endurance movements I want to focus on. Whilst these movements are exactly what I need to do for long term back health, they are not the best warm up. The best warm up is one that prepares me for the session ahead.

I’ve been able to get stronger on the landmine squat for the last 8 weeks. My previous warm ups were great, because they prepared my body specifically for this movement. Everything had been feeling so good. It’s not a coincidence that as soon as I removed my specific warm up, I injured myself immediately (literally, on the descent of the first rep!).

I just got a very painful reminder on how important it is to warm up specifically for my workouts.

You get to come back stronger

Setbacks suck, but if you take the learning, you absolutely will come back stronger.

Here’s a visual I stole from the internet that describes that really well:

Once I’m able to get back into things, I can guarantee I will do my specific warm ups with twice the resolve, and twice the intention. I’m gonna be the WARM UP GUY. I’ll be more prepared going into the training session than ever before.

It’s an opportunity to re-prioritise

If you ‘re no longer able to do X, it now becomes an opportunity to focus on Y.

I’ve been procrastinating on stretching my chest every day to help with the shoulder pain. I now have no excuse. This is the perfect opportunity to double down on this and make it happen.

Work is also going through a very busy period. When this happens, I always struggle to balance work and life. Less time in the gym means it will be easier to give work what it needs in this busy period.

I’ll also triple down on the base of the pyramid.

—

Look, I’m going to be fine. If I look at the big picture, this is nothing more than a mere blip – one that will only make me stronger. That’s how I need to look at it. I will simply redirect my focus and discipline towards what this new situation needs. And, do it with a positive attitude.

Perhaps one of the best things to come out of this setback, is this framework for dealing with a setback. Next time I get hit with a setback, I’ll be thinking about these five things:

  • Allow myself to be pissed off – but only for a very short while
  • What’s the silver lining?
  • What’s the learning?
  • How will it make me come back stronger?
  • How will I now re-prioritise?

As soon as you get clear on these, the comeback can begin!

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Daily Habits: Oct 2023 (Oof, now we’re talking!)

Before we dive in, a bit of a re-cap.

June, July and August were tough. I saw a steady decline in my consistency for most of my eight health habits. September was much better – more greens, and higher oranges. A good step in the right direction.

My goal for October was to shift as much as I could into the green. I expected it to be tough for sleep and steps, but was going to give it my best shot!

How I did:

(click here for the full 21 month journey of building these eight health habits)

I’m super pleased with that!

The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air Carlton Dance GIF by Max - Find & Share on GIPHY

I’m especially pleased with getting my steps into the green. I almost always get an average of 10K steps across the week, but it usually gets there in a roundabout type of way. In October, I was much more consistent on a daily basis.

There’s not much else to say. BACK ON TRACK.

November needs to be more of the same. I especially want to work on closing the gap for sleep. Teaser – I’m optimistic about my chances. 😴

I’ve been thinking a lot about these eight health habits lately. When I set out on this journey, I hadn’t quite realised how foundational they were. They are now the base of the pyramid for me.

Getting them under control has been transformative for me. Many people have noticed that I’m a very different person now.

I’m a lot more confident. I’m now a very disinclined person. I’m lighter and leaner. For the first time in my adult life, I’m confident in taking my top off. I have more energy. I’m sharper in my mind. I feel the best I’ve felt in my life.

Here’s the biggest surprise. This change in me has unlocked a whole new level of discipline and results in other areas of my life. With the base of the pyramid in place, I’ve felt confident and capable to attack and get results in other areas of my life – health, fitness, personal projects etc.

So, I have my thinking hat on. How can I help others achieve the same result?

It takes a change of mindset, tactics and an ecosystem of support and accountability. I know I can bring these things together into a very effective program that will help anyone achieve the same results I‘ve seen for myself.

I think helping others with this journey will be a big theme for me in 2024. Watch this space!

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Will you take charge of your health and well-being?

The human body is an incredible machine. I’m increasingly blown away by how accurately you can measure and influence its performance.

I started my zone 2 training session today with a 35 min run. My heart rate displays on my phone in real time as I run – which I usually keep around 135-140 beats per minute. I can achieve this with a slow run.

This morning my heart rate was too easily drifting towards the high 140’s. It’s no coincidence that when I checked my Whoop [1] stats this morning, my RHR (resting heart rate) was higher than usual. I also noticed that my HRV (heart rate variability) was lower than usual.

All this points towards my body not operating optimally. Again, it’s no coincidence that I’ve had poor sleep and been more stressed than usual over the last week or so. These insights will help me make some adjustments over the next week or so. I plan to go to bed earlier and dial down the volume and intensity of my workouts a touch. This will get things back on track.

Eighteen months ago, my blood pressure was coming in at 135 over 75. That’s considered high – normal. I want to be associated with neither. I’ve always accepted this because high blood pressure runs in my family.

I’ve made a lot of lifestyle improvements over the last 18 months. My last two blood pressure readings (I take it monthly) were 123 over 65, and 119 over 66. That’s a huge improvement – gold standard territory.

Here’s another good example. I recently had a DEXA Scan, a body composition test that gives an accurate measurement of body fat, lean mass and bone. I learned I was in the top 10% for my body fat and visceral fat, top 20% for bone density, and top 50% for lean muscle. I don’t have a previous scan to compare to, but I can guarantee the numbers would be nowhere near as good 18 months ago.

It’s incredible that I can manipulate my body composition so effectively. I know exactly how to lose body fat or gain lean muscle. It’s simply a measure of input (food) and output (activity) – both of which I track meticulously. The only factor is how consistent I am with the plan. When I retest with another DEXA scan in 12 months time, I will know exactly what I managed to achieve.

These examples show you how easy and inexpensive it is to measure and improve your health. Health wearables will give you a lot of information about your sleep, activity and how your body is doing. Blood pressure monitors are easy to use and inexpensive. A Dexa Scan tells you so much, and is very affordable at £150. You can even take things to the next level and measure your metabolic health with a private blood test (I use Forth).

You might ask, isn’t this over the top? No one did this 20 years ago. Why do we need to do it now?

You might feel normal, but it doesn’t mean you’re in good health (or that how you feel is actually normal). For example, only 12% of Americans are Metabolically Healthy. [2].

It took for me to make a number of lifestyle improvements to realise what I thought was feeling normal, was actually feeling lousy. Only when I became more active, ate less processed foods and kept better habits, did I start to feel like a completely different person.

So, the question is – will you take charge of your health and well-being?

By the way, you don’t need to go as far down the rabbit hole as I have. You can start by grabbing a half decent health wearable and then see what happens when you start to focus on being consistent with any of these eight habits. I think you’ll be surprised by how quickly you can make improvements. And once you do, it then becomes the start of a long, and valuable journey – one where you can realistically add a decade to your life. [3]

Notes:

[1] I love my Whoop, you can use this link for a free Whoop 4.0 band and first month

[2] Only 12% of Americans are Metabolically Healthy (metabolic health was defined as having ideal levels of blood sugar, triglycerides, high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, blood pressure, and waist circumference, without using medications. These factors directly relate to a person’s risk for heart disease, diabetes, and stroke)

[3] #276 ‒ Special episode: Peter answers questions on longevity, supplements, protein, fasting, apoB, statins, and more (Peter Attia makes the claim that if you take all of the steps in his book ‘Longevity’, you could seriously add a decade to life)

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Dana White’s incredible transformation

I don’t often write a blog post to recommend one piece of content. Today, I’ll make an exception – so you have something great to watch going into the weekend.

Dana White | Overcoming The Leading Killer, Metabolic Syndrome

Dana White used to have high blood pressure, bad cholesterol, high triglycerides and sleep apnea. He was overweight. He would fall asleep in meetings and forget things easily.

His doctors prescribed many things, but nothing worked.

Fast forward ten weeks.

Blood pressure, triglycerides and cholesterol – all gold standard. Sleep apnea, gone. He lost 35 lbs, and now has abs. Fatigue, gone. He’s sharper than ever, and running four successful companies.

In his own words:

I jump out of bed everyday, ready to kick today’s ass. I feel great. And I love it.

In TEN WEEKS.

It’s an incredible story, and one which highlights that if you make your health a priority, and build the discipline you need to live the right lifestyle – you can completely change how you look and feel.

You might think how you feel now is fine – maybe even exactly how you should feel for your age. I’m going to go out on a limb – most likely, it’s not. In most cases, there’s another whole new version of you around the corner that can look and feel so much better.

The solution isn’t rocket science either:

  • Sleep well
  • Be physically active every day
  • Eat mostly whole foods
  • Prioritise protein
  • Don’t eat too much
  • Drink enough water
  • Limit alcohol
  • Limit caffeine
  • Walk plenty

You know what’s surprising about that list? At least in my experience, it’s the opposite of what most people do. Really think about it. If you’re being intellectually honest, you’ll start to notice that.

And here’s the kicker. It doesn’t have to be 100% of the time. In fact, 100% is unsustainable and makes you miserable trying to reach it (trust me, I’ve tried hundreds of times).

80% is good enough. In fact, it’s perfect (that sounds odd to say huh?). It gets you the results, and allows you to have some balance.

50% isn’t good enough though. You have to commit more fully than that.

I’ve had a similar transformation to Dana. I look and feel so much better than I did a year ago. I’ve also improved a number of metabolic health markers in the last year.

I could never go back to my old lifestyle. I could never go back to how I looked and felt.

It’s not easy. But, like Dana said, Kate Moss was really onto something when she said ‘Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’

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Daily Habits: Sep 2023 (did the comeback happen?!?)

June, July and August were not great months for my habits. I saw a steady decline in my consistency across most of them. A puppy, being sick for the best part of 4 weeks, and school summer holidays (disruptive to routine) were to blame. Hey, sometimes life gets in the way!

September was my time to shine. I was still realistic though. I didn’t need to bounce back to green across the board but things needed to at least start shifting towards that direction.

Drum roll…

(Click here for the full journey)

More greens, and higher oranges. I’ll say that counts as shifting in the right direction!

A few points to note, that actually mean things are even better than they look on the surface:

  • Since changing my goals from weight loss to muscle gain, I now only fast on non weight training days. This helps fuel my body for the training sessions. This naturally dented my consistency %. If I had only counted when I planned to fast, it would have been over 80%. For October, I will take that into account, so it becomes a true consistency measure of what I planned to do.
  • Up until now, my steps have been a little sketchy for accuracy. There are two things that cause this. I often run when I do my zone 2 training. And also, Apple Health seems to track some of me riding a bike as steps. Both of these are technically not walking, which is ultimately how I want to measure my steps. This therefore creates an inflated step score. I only recently found out that I can manually remove steps from Apple Health. I started doing that for now-walking steps in September, and will continue that going forward. This means no more double counting. Essentially 10K steps now become harder to achieve. But, also the 73% under the new stricter criteria is actually pretty decent.

Overall I’m super pleased with September. My goal was to reverse the decline in consistency, and to start shifting things towards more greens. I did exactly that.

My goal for next month is to try and shift everything to green. I might struggle on sleep and steps, but I’ll be happy if I’m green on everything else and sleep and steps get closer to green. If anything outside of sleep and steps is orange, I won’t be happy!

I’m already 11 days into October and things are off to a good start!

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The Uncommon Life, Episode 7: Random Show (Bulking & Cutting, Gaining Muscle in Your 40’s, Air Fryers, Bryan Johnson, Water Filters, Whoop & More)

I decided not to do a post / email for each new episode of The Uncommon Life Podcast. However, we did something a little different last week.

Our first six episodes have been focused around specific topics. Last week, we thought we’d experiment with a bit of a random, free for all chat about what’s on our minds at the moment.

We ended up covering lots of cool stuff – as always focused around training, nutrition and leading a healthy, disciplined lifestyle.

If you liked this style of episode (or actually even if you didn’t), please let us know. Any type of feedback is super useful to us.

And don’t forget. You can support the show by leaving a review wherever you listen to it. And if you want to get notified when new episodes are out, follow or subscribe to our channel.

Spotify: E7: Random Show (Bulking & Cutting, Gaining Muscle in Your 40’s, Air Fryers, Bryan Johnson, Water Filters, Whoop & More)

YouTube: E7: Random Show (Bulking & Cutting, Gaining Muscle in Your 40’s, Air Fryers, Bryan Johnson, Water Filters, Whoop & More)

Apple Podcasts: E7: Random Show (Bulking & Cutting, Gaining Muscle in Your 40’s, Air Fryers, Bryan Johnson, Water Filters, Whoop & More)

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You’re using social media completely wrong

Using social media is a massive net negative for most people. But, it doesn’t have to be.

Social media is addictive, time wasting, distracting, anxiety inducing, [fill in the blanks]. However, the benefits also can’t be ignored. It can help you connect with new people, learn, be inspired, grow a business, build a career, [fill in the blanks].

Here’s the kicker. Social media products are designed to get as much of your attention as possible. This is their singular goal. Your attention is tied to the business model. The longer you spend on them, the more money they make. You ARE the product. Social Media companies have some of the smartest product people and engineers in the world to be the best at getting your attention. You don’t stand a chance against them.

Most people don’t even realise how big a net negative their use of social media is. If you’re a parent, you know. Because at some point your child has enthusiastically wanted to show you something that they really care about – and you’ve told them to ‘wait a minute’ because you’re engrossed with something on Twitter or Instagram that doesn’t matter. I’ve done it, and you’ve done it.

But, there is absolutely a way to use social media to a massive net positive – to have your cake and eat it. You can get all of the benefits, and hardly any of the negatives. But, you have to flip everything on its head.

At the heart of the problem is four things:

  • not knowing why you use social media
  • following people too loosely (linked to the first one)
  • using the feed
  • using it daily

I use social media in a way which negates all of the above things.

Firstly, I know exactly why I use social media. I use it to get ideas, learn and to be inspired. The areas I care about are health and mindset. That’s it. I don’t care what my friends are up to. I don’t care about the news. I don’t care about celebrities. I don’t care about businesses.

If you use social media without a goal (or too broad a goal), you’re going to get completely lost. So, take some time to decide exactly what you want out of it.

Secondly, I don’t ‘follow’ anyone, and I never use the feed:

This is the opposite of the normal user experience of social media products. Following a lot of people and using the feed is at the heart of the addictiveness of these products. Trust me, you have no chance if you use them this way.

Now, the obvious question this brings up is – how the hell do I actually consume content if I don’t follow anyone, or use the feed?

Easy. I bookmark (using my computer) the profiles of people whose content I want to consume. And I categorise them to organise everything:

Here are my high level categories:

Here are the profiles I have bookmarked in my health category:

This leads us to the mistake of following people too loosely. You have to curate these profiles very strictly. Every one of these people consistently produces content that is useful and matches why I want to use social media. I also look for people who have a high ratio of usefulness / number of posts.I don’t want to wade through lots of unuseful posts, to find one useful post – it’s too time consuming. Now and again, a profile will fall outside of my rules (maybe they end up posting more frequently, or I find their posts less useful). When that happens, I remove the bookmark. You have to stay on top of curating the profiles you follow.

Now for the last mistake – using social media daily (or like 50 times a day for most people!). It’s a terrible idea and completely unnecessary. It’s much better to batch everything and have one weekly session. In that weekly session, you consume all content from your curated list of bookmarked profiles.

I set aside an hour at the weekend to review the last week’s worth of social media posts from the profiles I’ve bookmarked. I start by firing up the bookmarks manager in Google Chrome. Then, I head over to my first category folder (Health). I right click it, and choose to open each profile in a different tab. Fourteen tabs immediately pop up – one for each profile. I skim through each one and review the last week of posts. I usually find something interesting or thought provoking for each profile – an idea, something I didn’t know, or something that inspires me. But, at the very least I will come across a handful of very useful posts across all profiles. That makes my hour very easily a net positive.

I’ll give you a real example. I spent about 45 mins yesterday (Sunday) doing my weekly social media check in. One of the things that stood out was this post – Choose Allies Over Comfort. It’s stuck with me since. It got me thinking about my friends and how this principle shows up (and where it doesn’t). This alone is well worth 45 mins of my time.

By using social media like this, you’re much more likely to get value out of the content you consume. You could also easily reduce over fifteen hours of social media usage per week [1] down to one hour. That’s FOURTEEN hours of your life you get back.

Two last tips for you.

Remove all social media apps on your phone. There’s not enough friction between you and the app to avoid the temptation to use it several times a day. Instead, limit your social media usage to your computer, and a time blocked session once per week. After, close the browser, and get on with your life.

If you’re creating and posting content on more than a weekly basis, try and also do it from the computer. Post, and shut the browser. Some apps make this hard (i.e Instagram). I literally delete and re-install instagram on a daily basis to make daily posts and check any replies (I really need to find a better way of doing this!).

[1] Daily time spent on social networking by internet users worldwide from 2012 to 2023

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