Let me start off by stating that I am no athlete, as a matter of fact, I do not even have a gym membership anymore; I gave up a sweet deal with Gold’s Gym after my youngest daughter was born (those of your who are parents can probably relate). This article is not written for those coming off of a 90 day boot-camp cross-fit challenge, (and while you would still benefit from this information if you are reading this), this is more of a strategy for increasing and automating healthy habits into your life. This article is mostly about how to create healthy habits that work.

Table of Contents

THE WHAT

That being said, getting “healthy” is a very ambiguous topic and unless you are careful to really define what that means to you, it is easy to get lost in the sea of semantics. In my therapy sessions, I help others do just that; create healthy habits. Individuals/clients almost always state their reason for seeking counseling as “to get better”, to “be healthy”, be “happy.” But it is very difficult to create a plan around these loose goals, because there is nothing definitive to work from, and defining your health goals is always the first step toward positive change.

THE WHY

Once you have a solid idea of what you want to improve upon, then you want to set out the reason, the motivation(s) for creating healthy habits.

I have learned this from my personal journey, and researching methods for creating healthy habits, and ways to improve my present and future health has become a bit of an obsession. What I learn and implement into my own life, is often what translates into what I share with my clients (when appropriate), only after I have found it to be effective in my own life.

For example, I seek to increase my health because I want to be around as long as I can for my children (and hopefully my grandchildren), as well as my spouse. That is a pretty BIG why.

Those suffering from anxiety, and/or depression, will often look around at others who they may label as “normal”, and then get stuck in comparative thinking, and make the mistake of assuming that “normal” people are just able to do things, to change unhealthy habits and be consistent in their efforts to create healthy habits. This is just not the case, at least not in my experience. The thing is, mood disorders often place people at a disadvantage because it robs them of the self-confidence needed to foster self-compassion, which in turn allows room for making mistakes, and learning from them. Rather, the obstacle becomes shaming, or shoulding oneself, which then cuts off any further experimentation of the change process. Self-Compassion is a vital part of improving your healthy habits.

THE HOW

This is a process I think of as automating healthy habits. When setting out to create healthy habits, I start with a mindset I refer to as saturation. Saturation is a strategy I engage in where, once I have identified a worthy goal, (like taking care of my liver), then I begin to find as many resources to research on the matter as I can from diverse sources (trendy sources like Livestrong to peer reviewed articles and medical sources like WebMD, the Mayo Clinic and Google Scholar, to name a few). Once I feel I have saturated the subject, I seek methods for implementation. In my personal health journey, I started by researching on the benefits of juicing vegetables, and started watching YouTube channels dedicated to the subject (like FIT LIFE TV). I was motivated to find ways to lower my cholesterol after a visit with my primary doctor; at twenty-nine years of age, he was telling me I needed to be on cholesterol lowering medication. Mind you, my blood results were always fine up to this point.

THE ACTION PHASE

It was not long after my Dr. visit that I purchased my own juicer, and I began to hone in on my ideal ingredients that were both consistently praised across my research efforts as well as affordable (it is simply not true that the best is the most expensive, and I was still in college, so pretty broke). Take beets for example, they are known to be a popular liver detoxifier, and they are affordable (whole beet bunches of three can be picked up at your local market for pretty cheap); ginger root (a powerful anti-inflammatory) is very affordable as well; carrots (great for the liver and lungs and eyes) are as well. I never did end up taking/needing the cholesterol medication and my blood work and blood pressure, for that matter, have been great to this day, more than seven years later. That is not to say that diet alone can resolve cholesterol problems for everyone, but it certainly cannot hurt to determine to create healthy habits and eat/juice/blend your veggies.

PRACTICAL APPLICATION

Now, I love, love, love juicing, but that is not always the most time efficient method. However, if you have the time, I strongly suggest that you try it.

Now, I know that there are a bazillion different juicers out there and the whole debate on whether is it best to go with a slow/masticating or “quiet” juicer like the OMEGA Juicer, or a fast/centrifuge one, like the Breville Juice Fountain Juicer.

Basically, in a nutshell, the fast juicers are just fine unless you plan to store your juice for a few days in mason jars, then it might be helpful to go with the “slow ones.” At any rate, what we are striving for here is CONVENIENCE with which you can be CONSISTENT. I have both the Breville JE98XL Juice Fountain Plus 850-Watt Juice Extractor (my original purchase) and the Omega Juicers NC900HDC Juicer Extractor (which is much quieter but has a small shoot).

REMEMBER

When attempting to incorporate any new healthy habits into our lives, it is crucial that you consider the PRACTICALITY of adding this new commitment into your existing lifestyle. For example, it is not reasonable to expect that I will be able to fit in a run before I leave for work in the morning. For starters, as much as I may romanticize the idea, I have no track record of ever actually running on a regular basis for exercise, and it is not likely that will start at 36 years of age with a plate full of work and family, especially considering the fact that I am not even eating dinner until after 10pm most of the time, when the kids are all down. Rather, I had to consider how to use the time structure already in place to incorporate new behavior into time that was already committed.

MAKE IT FIT

I did this by bringing my juicer to work and using my lunch time to juice (at the time I would bring my veggies with me or get them at the market next door to the clinic) and then use my break time to walk and drink my juice (two birds, one stone). This was a very practical way to create a new flow into my day with my new habit of choice, but it takes a good deal of trial and error to establish a meaningful routine that you can sustain. I use juicing just as an example for my mental process of establishing new healthy habits. To this end, if juicing is something that you want to consider as part of your routine, I recommend the Breville Juice Fountain, because it is powerful, only takes seconds to clean and it is fast with large shoot (you can put in whole cucumbers, apples, beets and several large carrots at a time).

CHANGE IT UP

Even with that, routines will need to be modified from time to time. For example, when I changed clinics to be closer to home (going on two years ago), my schedule started to become busier with new demands and juicing, as much as I love it, stopped becoming as practical. So I had to start figuring out a new flow that made sense and accomplished the same goal. I went back to researching the other side of juicing, which is blending. This is when I discovered these great products listed below, how easy it is to make a powerful smoothie hitting my top health priorities when time is short.:

IMPLEMENTATION PHASE

So that is what I did, I researched the best of the best affordable ingredients and boiled them down to the common denominators which have become part of my new routine; I have no intention of filling my pantry with twenty different supplements when I can hit my goals with just a few of the big guns.

My Method:

I will put all my ingredients (ABOVE) into a snack bag in the morning and keep by blender (my favorite is the Nutribullet 900 Watt blender, at work and frozen blueberries in the freezer. This way, I do not have to think about what I am going to do for lunch at work, and can simply add oats, frozen blueberries, my mixed baggie and water and done. I can drink on a walk and listen to my favorite podcast on my break, and actually hit three birds with one stone!

So you see, things will inevitably shift, and you will need to do things a little different to accommodate the new dynamics, but if you take the time to be a little proactive, it will be easy to find a new flow because you will have a baseline process for living healthier. In the event that you are wondering what blender I turned to (because I did, and did hours of comparative research before settling), I went with the Nutribullet 900 Watt blender, which is way effective and pretty cheap.

The frozen blueberries can be any old store brand, and I also like to add cinnamon to my smoothies for taste and anti-inflammatory properties. As far as other supplements are concerned, I take a daily vitamin and fish oil and Garlic pills (Zhou Nutrition), (for my heart health).

MORE THAN SMOOTHIES

In addition to the above, I have found the most common thread to good health is TO EAT YOUR VEGGIES and HYDRATE. So, putting into practice what I have discussed above, I try to automate these values by not only using the smoothie method above during the work week, I always keep my freezer stocked with steam bags of frozen veggies in the freezer, concentrated on the green stuff (Brussel Sprouts anyone?…yummy). As far as hydrating goes, I have found the gold standard to be ONE GALLON of water a day.

I try to AUTOMATE this habit by carrying around a liter flask to chug at work and at home (it takes three of these babies to make a gallon); I personally love the TAKEYA water flask, I purchased from Amazon, but there are many out there priced about the same, and one of the most common I see is the Hydroflask.

I am a bit of a water snob, and keep a water filter pitcher both at home and the workplace for my flask and smoothies; I highly recommend the Propur Water Filter Pitcher with 1 ProOne-G 2.0 mini filter element.

There is a lot of rationale as to why vegetables and hydrating are crucial to your health, but for simplicity of this article I want to pass along the basics.

Hydrating keeps your Kidneys at their best, and helps to flush the liver. Root Vegetables are great for detoxing the liver and greens are great for fending off the aging/disease process (all that jargon about free radicals).

INSIDE AND OUT

So as you can probably tell, I highly value taking care of the inside, but be sure to not neglect good old exercise. As I like to read about topics on health, I recently stumbled on a really neat article that expressed just how important moderate exercise is. Not even intense exercise, just good old fashion walking will do. This article from CNN outlines how “Not exercising is worse for your health than smoking, diabetes and heart disease.” It is pretty sobering stuff. If you want the short version, the basic consensus is that we all need to average 175 minutes of moderate activity a week, or 90 minutes of intense exercise; either of which needs to be in increments of ten minutes or more to count.

PUT YOUR INTENTIONS IN FRONT OF YOU

With the above in mind, I have found that the most effective method for me is to keep my intentions in plain sight. That means I will keep my dumbbells near my weight bench where I see them at the start and end of every day, like by my shoe rack, or the TV. Does that mean I exercise every time as intended, nope; but it sure increases the odds. In the spirit of convenience (most bang for your buck, time-wise), I have found that a good jump-rope is a great tool for exercise (low impact, high intensity, easy to transport and has a small footprint). Mind you, I was never into jump roping as a kid, and did not pick one up until my 30’s. I of course got turned onto it by, you guessed it, saturating myself with knowledge on the most time effective workouts. I stumbled on a very motivational YouTube channel (Jump Rope Dudes), which provides great instructional videos on HIIT workouts.

TAKE HOME POINT

There are a lot of things competing for our attention, all the time. The more intentional we can be about creating a mental model of what we want to prioritize in our day ahead of time, the more likely we will follow through and actually do more than intended (remember Newton’s first law of motion?). This has more to do with goal setting, which I will save for another post, but a great book I often refer to on the matter is: SSmarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity-Charles Duhigg – Random House – 2017, if you care for a good read.

I hope that you found this article helpful. If you have questions or feedback, please take advantage of the comments and contact me page.

ASK: If you have a question you’d like me to answer here on the blog (even if you think it’s a silly one!), please use the form on the CONTACT ME page, or the comment section below. I would be happy to take a poke at it and provide a long form answer when appropriate.

SHARE: Also, be sure to share it with a friend, as there is still a lot of work to be done in raising mental health awareness.

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