Ideas on Healthy Change to Make in Each Core Area!

Thank you for joining! I hope Core 5 will be helpful in your journey to build a healthier life. While your own ideas are usually the ones that will stick, seeing some examples can be helpful to get started. Check out the ideas below!

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Sleep

Low quality sleep can make us feel hungrier, eat more, can stimulate the brain so we get more pleasure from processed foods, and can make exercise more difficult.

1. Be consistent with bedtimes, even on the weekends. Like a muscle, sleep patterns strengthen with time, and your brain will reward consistency with higher quality rest.
2. If you’re hungry at night, a small snack can actually improve sleep, though larger meals too late can lead to indigestion and heartburn. Restricting yourself with food will never bring you lasting results.
3. Write down any thoughts before bed so that you can rest peacefully knowing you can pick up tomorrow right where you left off.
4. Wake up more peacefully by using light instead of sound. A gentle start to the day can keep us from flooding our bodies with stress hormones right away. Most light alarm clocks are pricey, but there’s a company called hOmelabs that sells one for around $24 (I’ve seen it as low as $13 when on sale). Clicking on the button below will take you to the hOmelabs website.

Exercise

For exercise, keep one thought always at the front of your mind: something is always better than nothing. You don’t have to be sweaty, feel beat up, or even be tired for it to be good exercise. Any way we can get our bodies moving counts.

1. Start small and consistent. Start with 5 pushups a couple times a week. Start with a ten second plank. Start by walking with a friend for 15 minutes every so often. With exercise, you can never start too small. Tiny steps are the path to long-term success. (For more on this, see my article On Imperfection.)
2. Before building an exercise habit, ask yourself: “What do I want the outcome to be?” For some, it could be running a 5k. Maybe it’s building muscle. Maybe physical confidence. For some, it’s an effort to keep up with a healthy lifestyle. If we honestly answer this question for ourselves, it can give us clarity on what to spend our time doing.
3. Enjoyment is key! If you truly want to build an exercise habit for life, don’t give yourself a case of the “just 5 more minutes.” Don’t go the gym if you don’t like the gym, don’t play a sport because you think it makes you cool, and for the love of everything don’t bore yourself running on treadmills (unless you actually enjoy it, but no one actually enjoys treadmills, right?) It’s never cool to put others in charge of what we do for ourselves. If we can find a physical activity that we’ll do simply for the love of doing it, lifelong results are as good as ours.

Eating

There is no one ‘right’ approach to eating for everybody. The human body can thrive under many different nutritional conditions. For example, you can be super healthy and eat mostly meat, mostly veggies, mostly fat, mostly carbs, 2 meals a day, 5 meals a day, etc. Anyone who tries to convince you that there is a single correct approach to healthy eating is incorrect. In my health coaching experience, there have only been two general pieces of advice I’ve found to be helpful for everyone.

1. Reduce processed foods.
2. Be mindful of portions.

Beyond these, most approaches can work if implemented consistently. I encourage you to experiment and find something that you can answer “yes” to the following questions:

• Am I getting the outcome I want from this eating approach?
• Do I enjoy this approach, and can I see myself sticking to it for years to come?

If time is a constraint, there is a meal delivery service called Fresh n’ Lean based in California that delivers meals that follow all kinds of eating approaches – Mediterranean, Keto, Paleo, Vegan, Plant-Based, Low-Carb, High-Protein, and more. Experimenting can be a great way to find an eating approach that we’re satisfied with and that brings us the outcomes we desire.

Stress Management

This is an area where it’s difficult to make suggestions, as what may be helpful for one person may be annoying and unhelpful to another. If something’s not working for you, even if it was a piece of advice given to you by the most Zen person you know, drop it and move on! Sometimes, when people find something that works for them, with good intentions they’ll start telling everyone about it. The thing they forget is that humans aren’t identical robots. What works for you may not work for me. We must each experiment to find what specifically is effective for us. Saying this, here are some ideas to experiment with:

1. Meditation – I’m no expert here and won’t pretend to be. Books from your local library or videos on YouTube can be helpful resources.
2. Breathing exercises – again, not an expert. One thing I can say is that I do breathing exercises regularly, and sometimes get discouraged because I feel like I’m bad at them. My mind is always wondering, I get distracted, I even will set a timer for it, then run that time out doing another task the entire time! My mindset shifted when I realized I wasn’t alone – this is a normal experience. Now I have a lighter attitude and get a kick of amusement out of being incredibly bad at simply breathing. Sometimes breathing exercises help me, sometimes they agitate me, but overall I find it a helpful activity to give my mind and body a rest during the day. I encourage you to see if they could work for you. Googling “breathing exercises” is a great place to start.
3. A self-compassion exercise: we are often really hard on and mean to ourselves. If you catch yourself being like this, imagine that a close friend is dealing with what you’re dealing with. What might you say to them? How does this compare to how you talk to yourself?
4. Pepper in self-care throughout the day. Think about what you enjoy – listening to music, walking outside, taking a bath – and plan ahead time to prioritize it. If you think this is selfish, remember that we must take care of ourselves to take care of other people and things in our life. As silly as it may sound, prioritizing these fun activities can make us more productive because it can give us boosts of energy and positivity throughout the day, both functioning to make us more creative and see more opportunities in any given situation. If you have a job that requires problem-solving, these “positivity breaks” will keep you sharp throughout the whole day!

Hydration

Hydrating can help us feel better, more energized, and can lead us to eat less. Since we are all unique humans, there is no one-size-fits-all rule here either, just general rules which need to be tailored to us.

1. A good starting place can be 8 glasses of water a day, and then we can each slightly adjust that to what feels good for us. For example, if you live in the desert, you may need more water than someone who lives in a more temperate environment.
2. Start small! As with any of the Core 5 areas, no step forward is too small to count. If you’re not used to drinking lots of water, your body may get stressed at a sudden change. See my article Comfortable Lifestyle Change for an example on this.
3. Choose a specific time each day to add a glass of water – for example, right when waking up. Consistency can make it easier to build healthier habits.
4. If you have a desk job, challenge yourself to take a sip from your water bottle each time you get up from, or sit back down at, your desk.
5. If you’re looking to invest in a nice bottle, Meshbottles is a company that makes quality glass water bottles with silicone grips. Plastic bottles can leach chemicals into our water, making it taste funny and put plastics inside of us. This is a great example of how what’s good for the planet is generally good for our health too. I love their purple (of course) 16oz bottle, as the smaller size is convenient to carry around. Finishing and refilling a few times feels like multiple small wins throughout the day, and the energizing and confidence-building impact of small wins is real! Click on the image below to head to their site.

We start where we are and make tiny steps toward healthy change. It’s no more complicated than that. I hope that some of the ideas and info here are helpful for you. Welcome to Core 5 and cheers to tiny steps forward!