Health

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!

Get my ideas straight to your inbox. Sign up for my newsletter below:

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!

Get my ideas straight to your inbox. Sign up for my newsletter below:

If you’ve been following my updates, you’ll know that things started to slip in June and July. There were reasons for that (getting a puppy, being sick etc.), but at some point I need to man up and stop the slide and bounce back.

So, my goals for August were to improve sleep, steps and intermittent fasting as close to 80% as I can – whilst maintaining all other habits at 80% +.

Let’s see how that went…..

Well, that didn’t work out very well did it?

Sleep went down. Steps and intermittent fasting stayed about the same. And, protein dipped below 80% for the first time this year! 🤦‍♂️

OK, OK, let’s back up a second before we get too bent out of shape about it. I have some more reasons. 🤔

On reflection, I should have seen this coming. I was still in the last stages of getting better from being sick, so that hit my steps pretty hard. Also, August (along with December) is a month that’s typically very hard to hold onto a routine. I should have adjusted my expectations. We had school holidays, so there was a lot of unusual stuff happening – not to mention I went on three trips for a total of nine days. I was out of my environment for at least a third of the month.

One more reason (it’s the last, I promise!). I’ve changed my fitness goals and am now focused on strength and building muscle. As a result, I’ve started to become more flexible with my intermittent fasting. If I want to get the most out of my weight sessions, they are better done with some food (fuel) in my body. What that means is that I’m choosing not to fast on weight training days (3 days per week), so that’s naturally bringing my average down. That’s fine. There’s no point in being dogmatic on consistency if it doesn’t serve me. For the foreseeable, that means my consistency for intermittent fasting will naturally drop to 55% ish. I’ll find a way of re-thinking this metric in September to better track against my new plan.

So, where does that leave me?

September truly is a month to start the bounce back. It doesn’t need to be green across the board, but I do need to start seeing things shift towards that direction.

So far, I’m tracking towards that!

See you next month!

Get my ideas straight to your inbox. Sign up for my newsletter below:

In June, my 6.5 hours sleep and 10K steps habits slipped below 80% (blame it on the puppy!).

I was hoping to tighten these up in July, getting all eight habits back to 80% or over.

Drum roll….

(Click here for the full 18 month journey)

Not only did getting 6.5 hours of sleep and walking 10K steps drop further, but I also fell under 80% for intermittent fasting. On top of that, I also saw a lot more consecutive misses.

I’m not about to panic. As I commented in last month’s update, I can’t expect a perfect run each month. July had a very unusual amount of curve balls, that can help explain why a few oranges are creeping in.

• Toby the new puppy is still impacting my sleep. He’s waking up very early (although this is slowly getting better) – so my sleeping window is compressed on some days. Also, I haven’t done a great job of getting to bed early when I know I’m on the early shift.
• I’ve been on-off sick for the last two weeks of July. This made 10K steps more challenging, particularly towards the end of the month (I was pretty much in bed). I also made a conscious decision to give my body more calories and to eat breakfast towards the end of the month. I think that’s what my body needed to recover. The consequence of that was I skipped fasting for five days in a row.

So, yeah, July wasn’t great.

I’ve had to reframe some of my expectations over the last couple of months. When I hit a three month 80%+ streak on all habits in May, I constructed an expectation that anything less than 80% for any habit would be unacceptable going forward. On reflection, that’s not realistic. There will be months where some habits may take a dip. And you know – that’s OK. It doesn’t mean I’ve lost the habit. It just means I’m going through a challenging period that makes 80% consistency difficult for some habits.

Now, that doesn’t mean I can get soft. When I see challenging periods around the corner, I still need to think about sensible ways to mitigate them. And when I’m in the middle of them, I need to try my best to limit the damage. If I happen to fall below 80% in a given month for a habit, I also need to think about what it takes to regroup and build it back to 80% when possible. That’s what real life is about.

And that’s what I will do now. Yes, I’ve taken a step back. But, with the right conditions, I know I can easily build back to 80% across the board very soon.

So, let’s talk about August. My goal is to get 6.5 hours of sleep, walking 10K steps and intermittent fasting upwards, and as close to 80% as I can – whilst maintaining all other habits at 80% +.

I think fasting will be easy. Steps will be difficult because they will continue to take a hit for the first few days of the month as I recover from being sick. Sleep, whilst easier than steps, will still have the whole new puppy thing going on. I also have a few trips planned in August, which may test the consistency here or there (although I am generally pretty good at mitigating against these nowadays).

A fantastic month would be all eight habits at 80%+. But, even if I get intermittent fasting back up to 80% and sleep and steps closer to 80%, that would be a good step forward. If that happened, I could then use September to get back to 80% across the board – as long as I had a clear run at it.

Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll take it a month at a time. August is for making some ground up, and taking a step forward.

As usual, see you next month.

Get my ideas straight to your inbox. Sign up for my newsletter below: