This was such a game-changer for me when I managed to do this!
Hello! I know routine has disappeared for a lot of people right now, I know maybe
you're used to going to the gym and exercising or maybe your routine was
to go in the morning but now you can't do that anymore maybe your work
conditions have changed and even though you might not be up to going a hundred
percent right now and don't feel like you have to, I just think it's worth
being mindful of having some regular healthy routine. So I thought in today's
video I would share some little healthy habits which have made their way into my
routine over the last few years and they have made a dramatic difference for me.
Not just in terms of physical health but also how I feel mentally, how I approach
my routine and how I approach each day. So let's jump straight into it. I feel
like I've told you guys this before but I honestly used to think that sleep was
a waste of time. Sleep is often a really neglected part of people's health and
well-being and I know a lot of people think yes a majority is about like diet
and exercise and working harder, so many people neglect the recovery aspect and
if you're exercising but you're not working on the recovery you're not gonna
get the results that you're expecting. Getting adequate rest will also help with
your immune function, it can help prevent heart disease and it can help prevent
excess weight gain. Studies show that people who are sleep deprived tend to
have bigger appetites and it also has a knock-on effect with their hormones. I
definitely noticed that my PCOS (if you don't know what that is is polycystic
ovarian syndrome) that was at its worst when I was at my most stressed out and
getting the least amount of sleep. I was honestly sleeping from midnight until
like 4:00 a.m. every single night. I, I just I wanted to get more work done and
I was wondering why my symptoms were getting so bad, why I didn't seem to be
able to control my weight even though I was exercising really hard, sometimes
twice a day and then I was also like watching what I was eating and it was
just like a mystery to me but there was no recovery. Now I'm trying to get to
bed a little bit earlier don't suddenly go 'I'm going to bed at midnight, I'm gonna
go to bed at 9:00 p.m. every night now' because it's not gonna work. You're gonna
go to bed and you're just going to be lying there for ages and it's going to be really
frustrating. So just bring your bedtime back little by little. So if you're going
to bed at midnight all the time at the moment - try 11:30, and do that for a
few weeks, even a few months if you need to and then 11 o'clock and just slowly
stagger it back. Also if you can swap out the electronics before bed, so instead of
being on your computer or on your phone - swap to a book or do some drawing or do
some journaling, something that's gonna get you away from the screen and disconnected
from the apps. The next thing that helped a lot was actually eating
enough food. Ladies, you can't always be in a calorie deficit, you can't always trying
to be losing weight, you can't always be trying to cut back on what you're eating.
Think about the long term here. This was such a game changer for me when I
managed to do this. There's gonna be times where you want to eat more ,there's
gonna be times where you want to be building muscle and then there's gonna
be times where you can cut your calories back and cut your food down a little bit.
If your calorie intake is true though you may not be getting all the nutrients
that your body needs and your body's natural response to you cutting calories
is going to be to down-regulate how much you burn and one of the most simple ways
that it likes to do this is by this slowing down your NEAT. So NEAT is
non-exercise activity thermogenesis - think of things like you know when
you're sitting on the couch and you're like oh I'll just pop up and clean the
kitchen, or oh I just feel like going for a little walk or just fidgeting and
moving around in general. If that starts to decrease it's your body trying to
save energy. Think about long term, like you want to keep the bone density, you
want to keep your muscle integrity, you want to keep your joints intact so that
in the long term you can be independent and mobile. So consider planning stages
where you will eat a bit more, you will maintain and then if you need to, stages
where you will cut the calories back a little bit.
Don't constantly be trying to cut them down. Now we also want to try and eat a
variety of different foods. Different foods provide different amounts of key
nutrients. I'm sure many of you aware of what macronutrients are - that's your main
nutrients. So we're talking like fats, carbohydrates and proteins but it's
actually your micro nutrients (the vitamins and minerals) which are going to
allow your body to process the macronutrients efficiently. I know it's
easy to get stuck into eating similar things all the time like I was telling
you guys about how a the same breakfast for like 4 and 1/2 months or something.. in
addition to that when you expose yourself to lots of different foods
you're helping develop a healthy gut bacteria. There's two really really easy
ways to add more variety into your diet. The first one is to eat a little bit
more seasonally so buy what's available at that time in your region. Another easy
way to do this is to pick one ingredient, a new ingredient that you've never tried
before every couple of weeks or so and try to combine it into some dishes. So
maybe it's purchasing an ingredient that you haven't heard much about or you
don't know how to use. Jump online and look for recipes and see how you can
include that in your cooking. Now even with an excellent diet sometimes it can
be hard to reach the essential nutrients you need in a day. Some of this can be
due to diet choices and some of it also could be if you're slightly deficient in
something. I wanted to thank ritual for sponsoring today's video. Ritual is an
easy way that you can help fill the nutritional gaps in your diet. You may have
seen this little bottle popping up lately
in some of my vlogs and things like that and it is because I have been using this
now for months. I'm on to my third bottle. So this is the Ritual 'Essentials for
Women'. Have you ever taken a multivitamin or a vitamin
and your stomach doesn't feel too great afterwards especially if you take it on
an empty stomach. This one you can take it on an empty stomach.
Now it's not a supplement for food but it can help fill in some of the gaps in
your diet. The reason that I decided to start using the Ritual capsule is
because instead of just jamming it full with heaps of different nutrients like
if you look at the ingredients labels on a lot of multivitamins it contains like
20, sometimes 30 different vitamins and in order to pack that many in they're
really under dosed. The Ritual 'Essential for Women' is different. So it's only got
nine essential nutrients in it. All in the bioavailable form which means your
body can absorb them and use them quite quickly and plus the dosages are
brilliant and the capsule is sugar free and vegan certified. If you want to give
them a go I do have a code which you can use to get 10% off for the first three
months so I'll leave that linked in the description box for you guys and it's
just a small step that you can incorporate alongside with what you're
eating to help create a healthy foundation for your body. Now an odd
thing that I'm gonna recommend particularly if you're someone who you
find when you're weighing yourself you can get a bit discouraged or like you're
weighing yourself too often. I've definitely heard stories of people
weighing themselves like multiple times a day and things like that -
stop it. Swap it for taking pictures. A scale weight only tells us one small,
small piece of the puzzle. There's so many things which can affect how much
you weigh. How much water did you drink yesterday? How much sodium did you have
yesterday? How much food is currently in your GI tract? Are you measuring at the
same time of day? Are you measuring on the same type of flooring? Are you measuring
with the same set of scales? Are you wearing the same clothes? And, where are
you at in your menstrual cycle? All of these things and more can affect how
much you weigh. And weight doesn't always account for body composition changes and
I feel like it can be dangerous to base all your results off what you're seeing
on a scale. Your progress pictures and the way your clothes fit you will tell
you a much better story.
You guys know I'm always gonna pitch this and it is meal prepping. The best
way to save time, make sure that you're eating on track and you're eating the
meals that you want to be eating rather than, you know, coming home feeling
tired or stressed out and sitting down and ordering something. I have so many
meal prep videos on my channel if you want some ideas because some recipes
don't last too long so you really want to find recipes that are simple and meal
prep friendly. So you can either store them in the fridge or in the freezer if
they take up too much room in the fridge and that way you've got your options on
hand all the time. If you don't want to meal prep whole meals you can just meal
prep ingredients. Maybe you like having smoothies for breakfast - chop up all the
ingredients, put them in some containers or some bags and store them in the
freezer or maybe you get bored of having similar things on a weekly basis so just
prep some bare essentials. Maybe it's just roasting some trays of vegetables,
maybe it's cooking up your starchy carbohydrates so that you have some base
ingredients prepared and ready to go. Now this made a dramatic difference and it
is planning your exercise properly. I used to always think that you had to
work harder. Do you remember me mentioning before that I was like exercising really hard,
sometimes twice a day and I felt like I was eating right but I wasn't resting
and I wasn't recovering? I was blindsided by the fact that I felt like I wasn't
heading in the direction that I wanted to and it got to the point where I was
overtraining because I already had a high stress lifestyle at the time and
then add on to the fact that I, you know, five or six days a week I was doing
weight training and then on top of that I was also doing cardio multiple
sessions a week as well. Sometimes you just need to let your body recover. Now
if you've never worked out regularly before, for the first two maybe three
weeks you'll be sore after your workouts but if you are continuing to be sore
like I'm talking like can't walk up the stairs,
just excruciating pain sore and you've been training for months, your
programming is not correct and it's not suitable. You shouldn't always be sore
from your workouts. If you incorporate a new movement that you haven't done in a
while or you haven't done before or you've added in something different or
changed up your split a little bit, yes some of that soreness will come back and
it's okay to be a little bit sore for maybe, you know, that afternoon or the
next day if it's just like a little bit. If you don't know how to structure a
workout download a guide. There's so many available. Not even just talking about
paid ones, there's free ones everywhere. I gave away free copies of my HIIT guide a
little while ago. I also have a workout booklet which you can do from home or
one that you can do from the gym and you can find them on my Eat Run Lift blog.
If you are constantly in a lot of pain after your workouts then your workouts
aren't structured very efficiently or you're not getting the recovery that you
need to be getting. Now with your workouts as well you want to make sure
that you're improving, you don't want to come back in and do the same thing every
single time. We want to make sure that we have what's called progressive overload
particularly if you're training in a gym. To progressively overload your workouts
we're looking at increasing either reps or weight lifted. An easy way to start
increasing the amount of weight that you're lifting is to play with the
tempo of your workout. So instead of just slamming weights around as fast as
you can, really slow down the movement, count to 2 to 3 seconds, pause at the
bottom of the movement if you need to. If you're doing a movement extremely
quickly you may be relying on momentum to do some of the lifting for you whereas
if you slow it down you really do have to pay attention to which muscles you
are activating and over time it can help you become a lot stronger too.
I've always been a big fan of this one as well and it's curating what content
you consume. If something makes you feel bad don't watch it. This has even led me
to like, unfollow or at least just mute. I like that that's a function now like
because people get upset like people you know seem to get upset when you don't
follow them, you can mute them now which is brilliant because it doesn't
hurt people's feelings.
I know these last two are more like lifestyle healthy habits but my final
one is to stop multitasking. It used to be the point where I thought I could
do 20 million different things at once but honestly like unless you sit down
and just slow down and do one thing at a time you're not gonna do it as well.
Focusing on one task at a time allows for higher levels of productivity. It can
help lower your stress levels and then in turn you'll feel a bit happier. Some
ways that I like to do this include like if I'm working on something really
intensely I like to put my phone into airplane mode. Another easy way is if you
are doing some things that involve online work try just using one tab at a
time. I know it can sound a little bit frustrating and it's not about doing it
all the time but these are simple ways to train yourself to focus on one thing
at a time. I also really love to do time blocking in my calendar because I find
that by like planning things out and like blocking in times for certain
activities I'll focus on just that activity because I know the other stuff
is going to get done later when I've planned in time for that rather than
being like 'oh I need to do this' and then halfway through a task I think of
something else and I switch focus. By running your day that kind of way you're
really gonna end up in a super chaotic headspace so really a key habit for me
has been planning out my weeks on Sunday afternoons or Monday mornings to make
sure that I have my week set up in a way that I know all the work will get done
and I don't have to rush and feel like I need to do all of it simultaneously.
Anyway, these are just some simple activities that have impacted my life
like basic behaviors that I've found have made a big impact and really helped me not
only with my physical health like, yes my training is better because it's
more structured and yes my regular food consumption is better because I'm meal prepping and
making sure I've got good options there but not only that my mindset is so much
stronger too because I have these basic foundations laid out that I can just
follow because they have become habit now. So it's not gonna be something that
you can instantly change. These are all just like little micro things that you
can work on. So if you want to make a change don't feel like you need to do
all of these at once like I know I definitely didn't like pick one to two
things at a time to focus on and that's how we make sustainable lasting change
is by picking focus points, working through with them until they are down and
they're solid and then we pick the next ones.
I hope you're well and I hope you've been taking some time to slow down and look
after yourself. Thank you for making it all the way through my video. I'm aware
that sometimes I ramble. Feel free to jump on over and join me on Instagram
@RachelAust. If you want to catch future uploads hit the subscribe button and
I'll catch you next time. Bye :)
you