Hey everyone.
If you’re new here and you’ve never seen this channel before, in your entire life,
click right here and subscribe.
But also, if you’re new here and you’ve never seen this channel before, you might
want to go back and watch some of my 5 day challenge episodes before you watch this recap
video.
For those of you who have been following along with Try Living with Lucie, I figured we have
a new year on the horizon, 2019 is almost here, so I figured I'd take some time to look
back at some of my favorite episodes, from 2018 and give you all some updates.
One of the most frequent questions I get asked is after trying all of these lifestyle challenges,
People always want to know months later after I tried five days of organization, is my apartment
still clean?
After five days of indoor gardening, are my plants still alive?
Am I now officially a morning person after five days of becoming a morning person?
I get tons of Instagram DM’s asking me this almost every day.
So I figured I'd bundle it all into one beautifully packaged video, and give it to you for Christmas.
Enjoy.
So first stop is the first video of 2018, Five Days of Meal Prep.
Way way back in January of 2018, I did five days of meal prepping, where I spent one entire
Sunday prepping my breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the five day work week.
So do I still meal prep?
And the answer is, not for five days worth of food.
After filming this episode, I realized that not only was the food toward the end of the week
kind of soggy and a little wilted for my taste, but it also felt a little bit monotonous to
eat the same thing every single day.
And personally, my taste buds crave diversity.
My schedule at Refinery29 is way less predictable than a typical 9-5 office job.
So since I’m on set shooting videos, about two to three days a week, I’m never quite sure where
I'm gonna be for breakfast, lunch or dinner.
And also many of my meals are eaten with the crew on set.
So bringing my own meals sometimes is not always feasible and can be a little bit rude to the
others.
All this being said, the five days of meal prep episode did help me start to feel a little
bit more comfortable in the kitchen.
I feel like I am on “Chopped”.
How do we want to cook the chicken?
How’s my rice doing?
Ah!
And I also made Alyssa Gagarin’s chocolate chip, peanut butter, chickpea bars about five
or six more times in 2018 because they are so good.
Alright, onto the next episode.
To be totally honest with you all, there have only been a few episodes of Try Living with
Lucie to date that have deeply affected my life.
To name a few, Five Days of Yoga, I now practice two to three times a week, Five Days of Ayurveda.
I’ve studied this topic extensively and it’s now become a major part of my lifestyle.
And also Five Days of Zero Waste, which has affected how I live my life both inside and outside
of my apartment.
And one other episode that has really stuck with me and added a major new hobby into my
life was Five Days of Calligraphy and Hand Lettering.
My first bullet journaling episode in 2017 inspired me to start a bullet journal of my
own.
And once I began my 2018 bullet journal, my hand lettering and calligraphy skills were
put to good use.
I’ve shared most of what’s in my 2018 bullet journal on Youtube this year.
Including a holiday spread which should be on my personal Youtube channel this month.
And you’ll probably notice that compared to my first ever video on hand lettering, my skills
have improved drastically in the past year.
And it’s all about practicing and getting the strokes down, and starting to memorize
how certain letters look when you connect them.
So certain letters like “r”s and “s”’s were way more difficult for me in the past
and now I’m a lot more better at them.
I love that when you type in “Lucie Fink Bullet Journal” to Youtube, you get a selection
of bright and colorful videos that pop up.
And I think if you add up the views on all of those videos, it’s approaching about
2 million views.
It just makes me so happy to see that a skill that I genuinely love doing is being enjoyed by
so many people out there.
Let’s keep this moving onto the next episode topic, 5 Days of Self Care.
As I mentioned in that episode, self care has become a 400 billion dollar industry.
And as more wellness bloggers and influencers have begun supporting this industry,
it’s becoming easier, and easier for consumers out there to think that self care is about
buying candles, and crystals, and taking bubble baths
and I'm just going to come out and say it: I'm as guilty as anyone.
I have definitely tied a ton of my Instagram partnerships to self care but it's important
to know that even though candles and crystals and baths are amazing there's so much more
to self care than those tangible things.
I made that first episode on self care back in March 2018 after I had a pretty rocky January
that was just filled with stress.
And honestly as the year has progressed and as my job has gotten crazier, and simultaneously
my social media channels have grown,
I realized that my stress isn't going anywhere!
As I grow and develop and my career path continues to weave and wind I know that the best thing
that I can do for myself is to stay grounded.
I'm the only one that's in charge of my health and my happiness and as I've come to terms
with this I've ramped up my self care.
2018 has seriously been my healthiest, happiest and most mindful year yet.
I've started including meditation in my life regularly, often going to meditation classes
in New York City.
or just listening to YouTube meditations at home.
I've begun listening to tons of podcasts about health and self care at any opportunity I
get.
I've been practicing weekly yoga with my twin sister and I continue to watercolor and bullet
journal as another form of de-stressing.
Alright, for the next episode recap
I'm going to mix two episodes in one because they're so closely related: Five Days of Spring
Cleaning and Five Days of Organization.
When I shot both of these episodes I realized just how true the saying is that outer order
creates inner calm.
Cleaning has surprisingly become something that I actually enjoy doing as an adult and
I say surprisingly because in my family I've always been the messy kid.
My twin sister is a total neat freak.
My older brother is really organized and my room used to be littered with clothes and
toys.
And now I've realized just how nice it feels to have things organized, clean, decluttered
and also how great it feels to donate and to just have fewer things.
I've continued to make my bed every morning, it's become habitual for me.
And I actually have an entirely new system that I use for washing dishes and believe
it or not it has become fun, fun!
To wash dishes.
I basically put on rubber gloves so my hands don't get all prune-y and I start by batch
soaping everything so once everything is all soaked up and clean then I batch rinse everything.
This saves water so I'm not running the water as I scrub and it also makes the process go
by a lot faster.
As for the way I organized my entire apartment in Five Days of Organization, honestly I kept
things pretty neat.
My bathroom cabinets have maybe gotten a little bit more cluttered as I have added a couple
of new products to the shelves here and there and my closets and drawers of clothes haven't
stayed quite as neat as they were when Horderly came over and taught me how to fold.
T-shirts are still pretty good.
This is the file-fold they taught me.
I definitely do need to refold some of those drawers.
I've had a lot of people asking me for more cleaning and organizing episodes.
Many people have even asked to see a clean with me video.
You know those 20 minute long videos on YouTube where I just roll
and play a timelapse of me cleaning something.
So if that sounds like something you'd be interested in watching, comment below and let
me know.
And now onto the next: Five Days of Different Styles.
This was one of my favorite episodes this year because that week proved to me just how
much your style can affect your confidence and the energy that you exude.
And actually since filming that one I do feel like I've started to express my personality
a bit more through fashion.
Growing up I never really felt like I had a specific sense of fashion.
In fact I felt like I had no fashion sense because I found myself constantly mixing colors
and patterns that other people told me did not work well together.
But there have been a few instances since this episode that I found myself picking out
outfits that really correlate to my personality.
For example I had an engagement party last month and I found myself pulling together
this really unique outfit.
It was these velvet blush pants with a white turtleneck body suit and then on top of everything
was this gold sequined sparkly dress.
I knew that I wanted the outfit
to be unique and different and almost a little fairytale-esque and I think the outfit I chose
really captured my personality.
Above all I feel like I'm starting to veer away from wearing things that are considered
universally stylish and more towards putting things together that I actually love or that
capture a specific vibe that I'm going for.
And from some of the responses I've been getting on Instagram it's becoming increasingly clear
to me that it's really not about what you wear, but it's about your confidence and how
you rock it.
Up next Five Days of Indoor Gardening.
In this episode I worked with my friend Maria Fialla from the Bloom and Grow Radio podcast
to completely transform my space, and add 26 plants and a pet fish, Buttercup, into
my house.
I've had tons of people asking me how Buttercup's doing and I know I shared this update on Instagram
but I'll share it here too.
I actually gifted Buttercup to a family friend.
She's a 12 year old girl who desperately wanted a fish and I realized that she would be a
way better fish mom than I was gonna be because my travel schedule is crazy.
A couple of my windowsill plants are doing better than others.
So the snake plant is thriving, it grew a few more sprouts and it's pretty tall.
The Sago palm looks good.
The parlor Palm is not doing so hot.
I'm not sure how to revive this one.
And the money tree looks okay but the leaves are starting to get some holes in them.
Since the episode, I've also added two new plants to that windowsill.
My kitchen herb garden is looking great too.
So I've switched to using an herb garden from a company called Click and Grow.
They come in pods and it's super easy to maintain.
First I was growing basil and then
once I harvested all that basil I switched it to peppermint and I used the herbs all
the time to make tea.
My lime tree is thriving.
He's grown so many more leaves since the episode and I've continued to water him about every
three days or so.
I even got a cute new ceramic watering can that I love.
I just love seeing all the greenery around here and I've inspired many of my friends
to start getting plants for their homes too.
Also since the episode I've named each of my plant babies.
The windowsill plants are all names from The Office.
So Dwight Schrute is my snake plant.
Kevin Malone is my money tree.
Then there's Phyllis and Toby, who's not looking so hot.
The two newer plants are Jim and Pam.
And I did originally have six air plants and they were Andy, Erin, Kelly, Ryan, Angela and
Oscar but all of them, except for Oscar, have died.
My lime tree is Michael Scott.
And then in my bedroom I have three succulents and those are the Mean Girls.
Gretchen, Karen, and Regina George.
Next Episode: Five Days of Becoming a Morning Person.
There was a time earlier this year
when all I freaking wanted was to become a morning person.
The thing you want to do is most definitely wake up early.
Why do I want to do that?
Because you want to be a morning person?
Do I ever stop talking about it?
Never, I'm really sick of it
I felt like morning people were more productive and more successful and I was so inspired
by people who woke up early and accomplished half of their to do list before the sun even
came up.
To be totally honest with you all interests and goals change.
And I'm not really
all that inspired to do this anymore.
I've even come across some studies that say what's best for your body is just what your
body naturally does.
So if you don't get tired until later in the night and you can actually sleep until later
in the morning then that might actually be what makes you the most productive.
The one aspect of this video that I have attempted to carry forward is setting that 8:00p.m.
stop time for myself when it comes to being on my phone and my computer.
This was also the episode where I started following Deepak Chopra's 21 day meditation
challenge on YouTube.
So I just wanted
to show you how pretty the final tracker looks now that it's all filled out.
And I also wanted to let you know how great that 21 day challenge was.
I had never stuck to meditating 21 days in a row before that and I really got into a
good groove.
Second to last video recap: Ayurveda.
I'll just come out and say it, this was my favorite episode of Try Living With Lucie
ever, in the history of Try Living With Lucie.
And based on the YouTube comments it seems like a lot of you felt the same way.
This episode took so much research and so much
preparation before I even started filming, putting the episode together and sharing what
I had learned with all of you, that was the easy part.
So how has Ayurveda continued to influence my life?
Well firstly I'm still listening to the Highest Self podcast.
I got myself a rice cooker and I've started making kitchari for dinner every so often.
Kitchari is a mixture of yellow moong dal beans, basmati rice, ghee, and digestive spices
and it's considered a very cleansing and detoxifying food in Ayurveda.
Let's see what else?
I scrape my tongue with my tongue scraper every
morning. Knowing that I'm a Vata I've started scaling back on most of the cooling foods
in my life and I've begun adding tons of warming grounding foods to my diet.
I've also started practicing abhyanga, or self oil massage, after showers.
And I've started giving myself a nice foot massage with sesame oil before going to sleep.
I've also been attending Ayurvedic workshops at my local yoga studio.
I've been getting into essential oils and I've had all of my friends and family take
the Ayurvedic dosha quiz.
And the final episode of the year that I want to recap is
Five Days of Learning New Skills.
I've Become fully obsessed with my Fender ukulele.
There's my uke!
I pick It up almost every night and either play new songs or write new songs.
I love YouTube so much.
That's all we have time for.
Thank you.
I think I've become
pretty good at strumming compared to how I was initially.
My fingers hurt when I strum like this.
So maybe I won't strum like that anymore.
Right now I'm almost bleeding on this finger.
It hurts!
Next, making my own scoby for kombucha opened my eyes to probiotics and gut health so much
so
that I actually made an entire episode of Try Living With Lucie about gut health and
this should be coming out soon.
The thing about this episode that really shocked me was how quickly you can pick up on a new
skill just by practicing and sticking to it.
I'm getting close.
See ya!
And I'm very excited because I even have a few more classes on my calendar for the end
of this year including a drumming class, a sushi making class, and an origami class.
So overall I'd say 2018 was a pretty great year.
I'd love to know what challenges you want to see me try
in 2019 and I would encourage you all to follow along with my personal life on my Instagram
@luciebfink and also on my personal YouTube channel which is just
There's one more new episode coming for you next week and then we'll see ya next year.
Love you!
Bye!
Hey YouTube thanks for watching.
Click here for one of my five day challenge episodes.
Here to subscribe to Refinery29 on YouTube and right here for my personal YouTube channel.
Love you.