This past week, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about making healthy choices easier in the new year. Basically, I’m trying to find ways to automate and schedule doing more of the healthy things, and remove obstacles that are between me and healthy habits. (If you’re not even sure what healthy habits to go for, check out our free 7-day habit guide that comes right to your inbox with easy actionable ideas!)
Automate
Can you make habits just happen without even needing to think about it?
A few examples:
- Doing click-and-collect for groceries with a cart that autofills with a vegetable, fruit and protein-heavy shopping list—avoiding crowds + the chance that you’ll skip the steel cut oats in favor of cinnamon rolls
- Setting up recurring orders of things like whey protein, probiotics, et cetera
- Setting up notifications on your phone to remind you when you have a workout coming up
Schedule
How can you build healthy habits into your calendar so they don’t get skipped?
A few examples:
- Molly’s to-do list is ridiculously long, but that’s partially because there are a few daily healthy habits in there that come back and need to be ticked off daily. They include journalling, meditation, training/filling in the training journal, morning yoga, and pullups. To feel done for the day, those all need to get checked off. (I use ToDoIst, which allows for recurring tasks and integrates with GCal. It’s amazing. But there are other habit trackers out there that you might prefer!)
- Actually sign up for Zwift rides or online fitness classes—in fact, we’ve noticed the number of Consummate Athlete Coaching clients who jump into our 7am Friday yoga sessions have gone way up in the last couple months, which is awesome to see! Most of us won’t do our yoga solo, but when it’s on the calendar with other people at a specific time, it gets done.
Remove Obstacles
What are the reasons you’re not getting the things done that you know you should be doing?
A few examples:
- Setting up your yoga mat and leaving it set up with everything you need for mobility and strength work. Same applies to your trainer setup!
- Molly loves grapefruit, and obviously, eating more fruit and veggies in a day is a good idea. But grapefruit is super messy, unless you have a grapefruit spoon (which I had and lost years ago). It took 30 seconds to order a new one, and suddenly, eating grapefruit = easy as pie. (This is similar to our debate over whether the zoodle-izer was worth it, which it ultimately was for increasing veggie consumption.)
- It’s hard to get outside when it’s cold and wet and your shoes are soggy from the previous ride or run… So get a shoe dryer for quick-drying your sneakers!
Struggling to figure out where to go from here? Check out our new book, Becoming A Consummate Athlete, for tons of easy habits to add to your life to make big changes, or book a call with us to talk through some changes you could make that will make the biggest impact on your health and fitness!
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