Small Daily Habits to a Healthier You

Join me today. Today is a public holiday in beautiful Tasmania and we have a 27 degree day here today, which means it's stinking hot. We just had the sun burns into us over about 20, 24 degrees.

So it's a very warm one today. And I'm talking about habits today. What are habits and how can they change our entire life?

Because habits on their own aren't anything big. It's just decisions that we make every day. Sorry, just need to check my little microphones there.

It's just decisions that we make every day that can alter our life in so many ways. Because when we make small daily decisions to do something, then you look at six months down the track, a year down the track, and we get amazing results from those small daily habits. So it's actually quite mind-blowing what they do.

So if you look in one of the dictionary definitions, a habit is something you do often and regularly, sometimes without knowing you're doing it. How many of us have a habit, like my friend was saying today, that every Christmas they have croissants and fruit salad follows after. Not long ago, she bought some croissants, and she's been doing this for years, some croissants, and she just had to have that fruit salad after because that's become a habit to her.

Now habits can work for us and against us, and many times we'll talk about bad habits, but we can also cultivate good habits. So maybe a good habit could be that every time you feel inclined to just sit around and mope around the house because maybe, like me, you get a bit gloomy on cloudy days, you can make the habit to just get yourself out of the house and go for a walk somewhere in the fresh air. And it is amazing how when you get back, you feel so good.

But if you make that a daily habit that every time you're feeling a bit low or a bit down, you take yourself out on a walk somewhere, it becomes a habit. Excuse my squinting, the sun is quite bright and I might even stick on my sunglasses for a while. Sorry, no people don't like looking at sunglasses, but make it a bit easier for me for a while.

So yes, so and some of the bad habits. How many times do we grab a cup of tea or coffee and go, where's the bicky to dunk in the tea or coffee? Because that's just something we've always done.

It's become a habit. A habit of mine is every time I went to the cinema, and my kids will probably tell you that this has become a habit for them as well, I would buy lots of treats. So when you go to the cinema, you sit back, you chill out and you eat chocolate and gorge on chips or whatever it is.

It became a habit through my childhood. And unfortunately, it's become a habit into my adult years as well. So I still love going to the cinema and taking some junk food, although I'm trying to wean myself off that habit.

Another habit can be, you know, just as soon as you get home from work, you switch on the TV because that's what you always do. And that may not be a problem, may not be a problem at all. But if it impacts on other people that share your household, it could be a problem.

It could be a habit that you may want to replace with something else. And talking about habits, so good choice after good choice over time will affect things in a big way. And as I just spoke about, just saying that can be good or bad habits, and it can be impact you in a good way or not good way.

But it is I just want to talk about the slight difference between a goal and a habit. So the difference between there is a goal generally has a start and ending thing. If you do an eight week challenge or something or your 12 week challenge, you have a goal at the start of that by the end of that 12 week challenge, for example, you want to have gained more fitness, maybe you want to have lost some weight, you want to tone up, whatever it is, at the end of that 12 week, you'll have a goal, you get to that goal, and that's it done unless you create another goal that you'd like to achieve. And that's doable.

But the difference between a goal and a habit is a goal has a beginning and an end. A habit is ongoing. And a habit is every day those tiny little decisions we make every day.

Do I want to lie in bed, for example, say for example, you're a mom with four young kids, and you just don't have time for yourself at all in any way. So you don't have time to get fit. You don't have time to maybe just sit back and and have some mindfulness or some meditation, maybe to start the day.

So you have you can create yourself a daily habit that you get yourself up half an hour earlier, then you know your kids will get up. So if they generally wake up at six o'clock, and I know it's pretty early, but maybe you wake yourself up at 530. So that extra half an hour will give you time to yourself or time to do an online program or just go for power walk around the house 10 times, you know, and then you'll feel great.

So we can cultivate good habits every day. And it's not a big thing to do them sometimes. If I feel like I'm a can of coke, you know, maybe if you don't have the cans of coke in your fridge, and you start to cultivate the habit of having a nice chilled glass of water with a little bit of lime in there, say for example, yeah, that's a great, a great way to start to cultivate the habit.

I don't want the soft drink, but I want the water or filtered water with a zap of something in there that's really natural, but makes the water taste great. And that over time, I guarantee that over six months, 12 months will become something that will alter your inside of your body because it will become healthier. But you'll also see results from the outside as well as you maybe start to lean out a bit more, because you're not taking all that soda and it's well known that soda just some side thing that people that drink soda a lot are more inclined to take gain more weight.

So it's a really interesting thing. So habits are sometimes things we don't think about, they are minute things. And along the way, it will make difference.

So you just think, when I'm on night duty, I had a habit really bad. And many nurses will tell you the same thing. When you're on night duty, your body craves energy, it craves sugars.

So if anyone at work has had, say if I've had an afternoon tea, and all the stuff, all the leftovers are lying on the table. Now, normally, I could resist that. But on night shift, it's irresistible.

I cannot pass by without devouring everything on the table. And so that has become a habit of mine that when I'm on night shift, I was devouring not good stuff. And I did see my waistline increasing, didn't happen overnight, but it did happen.

So not all of a sudden, but small incremental gains after devouring all this stuff. And particularly if you work in smaller, more enclosed units, like, you know, a prem babies unit, neonatal unit, pediatric unit, they seem to take the most crap I've ever seen. But I've made a habit then after gaining quite a bit of weight, I decided, right, Cherie, my clothes are not fitting anymore, my work clothes are not fitting, and they feel really uncomfortable.

So instead of just choosing to just get into the habit, I come to work gets to about two o'clock in the morning, three o'clock in the morning, I'm going to eat what's there, I would take my own stuff. So I would plan for that. And I would have my blueberries, Greek yogurt with a sprinkle of granola and have some other bits of fruit and some really healthy stuff that I would take.

I would choose that over what was there. And sometimes I succumbed, but it wasn't half as much as what I succumbed before. And I'll tell you, the results were good.

I had great results over a period of time, it didn't happen overnight. It wasn't that I chose not to partake in all the chocolate one night, and then the next morning, I was five kilos less. No, it was over a period of time with small habits every day, making those decisions.

And it's not just a feeling, I feel crap today, but I'll do this, making a decision for that small change I'm going to make today. So I have a choice of Coke in the fridge, or a nice chilled glass of water that's maybe filtered as well with some lime in there. You know, this is going to make me a big difference over the next three or four months, and I will see it.

My clothes won't be so tight. I believe in going by clothes if you're looking at weight loss.

And so when I sometimes feel just when there's gray days, they get to me. So there's a thing called SAD, Seasonal Affective Disorder. Some people may believe in it, some may not.

I do believe in it because I went from Perth, Western Australia, where the sun was shining every day for like nine months of the year to Tasmania, where a portion of the year is surrounded by gray clouds. I know above that, the sun's shining, but I can't see the sun. And it affects your head, it gets your head screwed up.

And so now on those days, I will opt, if I can, if it's not too chilly to get on my bike and I'll go for a ride and I'll make that ride a hard ride. And it is amazing how I come back and my head's in a different place. So we can opt to make those small, small changes, or I could have just sat around and felt gloomy.

And probably when I feel gloomy, I tend to kind of track along towards Chocolate Route. Although I am making changes with that as well. So we can make that decision.

And these small wins along the way, that was a small win. So if I have a dark gloomy day and I know I'm going to succumb to it, then my small decision to go riding for an hour, really hard at places that I know, pop the bike down when I get home and have a nice glass of water rather than sitting there and succumbing to that whole cake of chocolate, then I've made a big win for myself. And the more I do that over the period of weeks and months, yeah, the more that I'll start to change what I do and who I am.

So I would think about some major, so I just want to talk about three major decisions that you can make. So three major habits that you can make today. One is to choose you.

So choose you in putting into you, building you up, making you feel good. And there's a podcast I listen to. So Kirstie Wright talks about, she talks about habits and how she talked to a bunch of mums and asked them one night, well, she was, they were her good friends as well.

They're out for dinner. And she said, pick one thing that you do for yourself, just for yourself. It's not to do with family.

And they couldn't pick one. She had cultivated the habits of looking after herself as well, because in the process, she knew she was a better mum, a better wife, a better friend, a better everything than what she would have been had she not looked after herself. So I would cultivate number one habit, choose you, look after you, take care of you.

And if you're not doing anything to look after you, then start to do so. I had a choice this last week. So today's a day off in Tasmania for most people, a show day.

And I could opt last night to do an extra shift where I would have earned quite a bit of money. But I knew I was feeling a bit crabby, a bit snitchy, not really great to be around over the last few days. So I chose to come away to Bruny Island, where we stay in a beautiful shack, come holiday home, can't call it a shack.

Shack's kind of more tin, galvanized iron. This is beautiful. And as you can see, we look over the water.

What better mindset stuff can you have than this? Unfortunately, the day before my friend fell down on a walk we were doing. Whoops, sorry, my microphone's gone.

Okay, it's back again. So she fell down a cliff, oh not a cliff, she didn't fall down the cliff, she would have been dead. She fell down the hill and broke her ankle.

So the whole afternoon was dedicated to that. But today's our day. And she's managed to come back over with her leg in a plaster cast.

But today is a day where we're just having time out, smelling the roses. And it's been a beautiful day. I'm loving the sunshine, loving being here.

And I just feel a sense of peace. So this is my two days out. You may not have time for two days out.

But if you can only take that hour out, you know, when I had young kids, I never had family support, not ever. So I just had to find friends around me where I could look after their kids on certain days. And I would get rid of most of my kids on the other day.

So if I can, I'd organize with different families. So my four kids were different ages, I'd send them all off to a good friend and I would have two or three hours out while I knew they were happy, well cared for. They were having a ball actually.

And then I'd go pick them up. But I was recharged myself. So fine, eke out time for yourself, scrape at that time, be firm about it.

Don't let anything take that from you because we need to look after ourselves. And it could be something like you take time to work out. Workouts are great.

They release the endorphins, there's ants around here. So excuse me if I flick them off every now and then. It releases the endorphins.

It just makes you feel good. And if you did that three or four times a week, man, you feel great. Just one of our clients today just got back to me and said, since she started on our online program, she said, it is amazing, Cherie.

I am so happy. I love being part of the class, even though she's in her own home. And she said, I'm feeling great.

The stiffness I had is going. And she said, I'm feeling good. I feel like I'm going to the gym every day without leaving my lounge room.

How cool is that? So eke time out for yourself. Maybe it's going to get a remedial massage.

You've got a tight spot in your shoulder or back and that just makes you feel so good. It's a whole hour of lying on the table while somebody delves into you or gives you a nice, gentle massage. Having your hair done.

I love having my hair done. I feel so fussed over. People flick it around and pull it out, cut it and pull it out again.

That is delightful to me, yet I know some people that hate their hair being touched. So that wouldn't be a good one for you. Maybe having a facial done.

Go treat yourself to a facial every few months or every few weeks, however you can afford to that tinkles your bell. Or have a friend do your face and you do hers. That is still being pampered and time out.

So there are ways and means that we can choose to look after ourselves. And if you take care of yourself, you are a better person for every single person around you. I know that I was always a far better mum when I had time out.

I couldn't wait to see my kids again. Whereas if I never took time out and that was for a while, I did that. I thought being a good mum meant you were meant to be around your kids all the time.

I got so crabby sometimes. So definitely taking time out. 

And the second thing, the second habit I'd love you to cultivate yourself is choosing to be thankful, choosing to have gratitude and believe the best of things.

So if somebody pulls in front of you as you're driving along, maybe choose to think they just didn't see you in the blind spot of their mirror and they were feeling so bad in their car rather than going, you stupid idiot. You know, choosing to believe that they didn't see you there. So I'm going to have a little drink.

So it's amazing how just to have some gratitude changes your whole head space. It just changes how you think about things. And so if you can be thankful for whatever you can number off and be thankful for today, it could be the fact that you can breathe.

It could be the fact you can walk an up and down stairs. Whereas my friend with her broken ankle right now can't. You can be thankful for all sorts of things.

It can be thankful for the fact that you can eat every day and that you're not homeless. So there's so many things to be thankful for. And if you do get offended by somebody that said something that hasn't thought much about what they said, they didn't mean to offend you, but you took offense and you can choose to take that offense.

And one thing that somebody said to me once is build a bridge and get over it. I love the idea of choosing to go. I don't think that they meant to be mean in any way, shape or form.

I'm going to get over it. I've had people laugh at me before when I've tried to say my name. Some of my clients, because I stutter more when I'm tired or when I'm talking fast, and my go-to is normally talking really fast.

So I'm purposely talking slow on here, but you'll hear a block every now and then or a little bit of a stutter. But I'm focusing on my speech here. But I've had people laugh at me and go, oh, you can't get out your name.

You can't get it out. And at first that was just awful. I'd go home and cry for hours.

But after a while, I realized, and in fact, a couple of times I took the time to say to that person, do you know I'm a stutterer? I went, oh, gosh, I am so sorry. So choose not to take offense because you'll be a whole lot better if you don't hold onto offense.

Offense can really cripple us. And I feel it can give us illness as well. So if you hold onto offense or grief, it can eat away at the insides.

If you don't want that, let it go. It's not worth holding onto. It's just not worth holding onto.

So just let it go, let it go, let it go. And probably the person that offended you has long moved on. You would have heard that before.

So let it go and move on. And it also goes the other way, too. You can actually choose to have a thought that I'm never going to be any good.

I'll never get out of this. Or I'm always going to be poor. I'll end up eating at McDonald's for the rest of my life.

I'll never eat at a restaurant like they can afford to. You know what? If you keep saying that to yourself enough, your head will start to believe it and you will receive that.

So if you keep saying to yourself, I'm never going to get there. I'm never going to achieve it. I'm never going to get forward in my job.

You know what? You say that to yourself enough times, you'll believe it and you will not put the things out that you need to get forward. So you will not achieve in your job.

You'll never get forward and you'll never achieve those things you want to if you keep saying them. I'm all one for positive affirmations. And I know that there's a lot of different thoughts on this.

But when I was depressed, you know, I had mild depression back in... I don't know what was going on in our lives at the time, but I had four young kids and there was a lot going on. Our son had seizures, almost constant seizures.

There was just a lot going on with him. We were in the hospital every second day. It was a lot to do, a lot to take in.

And I know that when I went along to see my psychologist, she believed in positive affirmations. So every single day, I had to take some thoughts in my head that weren't good thoughts. And it could have been, you know, I don't get on well with whoever and I don't have a good relationship with that person.

Then I reverse that around. I have a great relationship with that person and I love being around them every day. And this, by the way, was no one in my family.

Oh, no one in my immediate family. But I started to say 40 to 100 times a day, my homework was to say the positive stuff and not the negative stuff, which went around around my head. And it's amazing.

I had to go see the psychologist every week. And the more I went back to it, on my scale of depression, I was starting to lift right out of the depression. So it was simply by saying the opposite.

So if you have something that really gets to you, like, you know, I hate driving this drive when I go to work, there's so many people on the road, I hate driving on these roads. But that's the road that route you have to take start saying to yourself, I love this drive in the mornings, I get great joy from it and I listen to great podcasts. You know what, probably in how I see things with it, how this all worked for me in the positive affirmations, you'll probably start to see things in a whole different light, you may never totally fall in love with that road, you have to drive to to work, but you probably won't sit in that same negative net negative light that you once did.

So you'll start to see it that it's not so bad. And hey, I get to use this road to listen to great podcasts. So positive affirmations you can't beat.

And then the third one is, is to have the best functional working body you can have. We only get one body in this life, one body. And unfortunately, in many of our Westernized societies, I know in America, in the UK, in Australia, we have this mindset of getting older, and we have to rest.

So that getting older label allows us to sit on the couch, sip, you know, our cup of tea or coffee all day, and get up just to move and we then get an ache and a pain because we sip so much. But then we say to ourselves, Oh, that hurts, better rest it, I am getting older, you can expect aches and pains. You know, what if you get older, don't expect anything again, change your mindset.

So it's every one of these little daily habits that can change that daily habits can alter, totally transform, amazingly, yeah, amazingly change how you grow into older age. And if you're young, how you grow into your 20s, 30s and 40s. Okay, because those little things that we decide day after day can alter how we are in two years time, three years time, five years time, 10 years time.

So I would say to you, if you're not moving daily, get off your bum and move. If there's aches and pains, go see a physio, ask around your friends who they've had a good physio, go to a good physio, go do good exercise. Sorry, I just had a flying insect that landed on me and bit me.

Sorry, sorry, I didn't mean to scream. That did hurt, by the way, that's what you get from a Facebook live. It's live.

So sorry, ow, I'll tend to that in a moment. I'm just about to wind up. So I'm sorry if I burst your eardrums.

So yeah, so it's those daily decisions you make. So rather than sitting on the couch every day, make a decision to go and do something. And I would say for strength training, if you're not strength training in your 50s, 40s, 50s, 60s, but particularly 60s and over, you can have the best quality of life that you've ever had never expect to have if you make those daily habits of working your body, getting strength training, get a good program, get our program spicefitness.com.

You'll find the SpiceStrong program on there for no more than a cup of coffee per week. But daily decisions that we make every day will impact us on the long term and short term, even a few months down the track that will impact on what results that we get. So I would say to take daily decisions with what you eat and drink.

Right now I've got my nice water, Bruny Island water. It's come straight from the clouds, so it goes into a tank. And so those decisions, whether I drink the Coke or whether I drink water, am I going to go in now and eat that whole cake of chocolate that I know is in there?

Or am I going to have something to eat before that that's far more healthy, and then maybe I won't feel like the whole cake, I might just have a square or two. So there's so many small daily habits that we can make that will change what we do. So the four main pillars of SpiceStrong are our nourish, our strength, our restore and believe.

So some of the daily habits that you can make when it comes to nourish is to eat regularly. So try and make a habit that you eat regularly. If you don't, you get hungry.

And then what do we do when we're hungry? We tend to gorge out on whatever's lying around. And that could be that cake and chocolate.

I talk about chocolate a lot because I'm a sucker for chocolate. So I'm just being real with you. Chocolate is a big thing.

So eat regularly. That way you won't want to just gorge out in one big binge all at once. Plan ahead.

So make the daily little habits of planning ahead. So maybe the Saturday or Sunday, maybe you work Monday to Friday, you come to Saturday or Sunday. And those are the days you make those habits where you plan for the week ahead.

And that just becomes a habit. It becomes your Saturday habit or Sunday habit. That's what I do every week.

And I plan ahead for good meals. So plan ahead with that. And it becomes just what you do.

It becomes your regular lifestyle routine. Daily habits of real food. So what am I going to stock my fridge with?

I'm going to stock it with real food. So all those foods that are unprocessed as possible. I know we have to eat some processed stuff, but as unprocessed as possible.

So try not to take things from packets if you can. And make it practical for you. So habits are not going to work if you instill someone else's habits.

So if my friend finds that, say, eating paleo or keto or whatever it is, the diet of the day works for her, but it doesn't work for me, then make something that works for you. So it needs to be for you. Something that works for me incredibly well is the prolonged fasting overnight.

I used to get up in the morning first thing, have breakfast. But I found now that going the 16 hours, so if I last have my meal at six o'clock in the evening, I won't have anything to eat till the next day till, was it 12 o'clock? 12 o'clock.

And then I've got an eight hour period where I eat well, extremely well. But I still try and make good choices. Ow, I can feel that little thing stung me.

Bit sore. And so yeah, so again, make it a daily habit. Make it a habit of what works for you because it's got to fit into your lifestyle.

And even fitness stuff has to fit into your lifestyle. So if I tell you to do an hour every day and you don't have an hour every day, it's not going to work for you. So work out what works for you and then start to make small tweaks as you go along.

Small tweaks work out to a big effect in the end. And the other thing I would say about diet is keep a track of what you're eating and drinking every day. So one of my clients once said, oh my gosh, Cherie, I am working out with you three times a week.

I was losing all this weight now. I've just started again. What's happened?

And I said, well, Joan, you did tell me, sorry, just popped her in it, that you're going out to a whole lot more morning teas and afternoon teas and lunches now because your group has met back again. And so every day you're going for out for a meal. And she went, oh my gosh, yes.

So she started to take note of what she was eating. And yeah, she'd upped her intake by about two thirds. So as simple as if you can't, if you don't want to write it down, take a picture, maybe go two or three days, take a picture of every single thing, including your glass of water or your tea or coffee, take a picture of your meal, snacks, those few nuts you ate, that bit of fruit, take a picture of all of it and see what you're taking in a day.

Because the overall reality is for most of us that don't have a thyroid issue or some major issue, that what goes in, that the input, our expenditure to what we put out needs to be more than our input. So if I'm going to eat a couple of packets of Tim Tams a day and a bowl of ice cream, my input in the way of calories is going to be much huger than probably my output. So having a look at that and really trying to just kind of go, I can cut down.

Do I need to have a whole thing of this or a whole thing of that? I can maybe have half, still get the taste or have one. And mindfully, if you wanted to Tim Tam and really get the taste rather than gorging a whole packet, take one Tim Tam, eat the end of it, eat the end of it, eat the end of it again, and then roll it around your mouth, taste it, mindfulness.

So you taste it, enjoy this, savour the taste, savour it, and then eat the next little snippet of it. And slowly, maybe over about 20 minutes or so, you'll eat one whole Tim Tam and you probably won't want to eat the whole packet. So there's ways and means to make little habits work for us.

So the strong part of it, strong, stay active, stay active for a start. So if you're a couch potato, at the very least, get yourself moving, get yourself going, and do things you enjoy. You know, we walked up this cape yesterday where we had stunning views out of the whole of Bruny Island and out over the channel.

Unfortunately, my friend slipped on the way down just after I said to her, your new boots are awesome. They have so much tread. And she said, far better than her sand shoes, which had no tread, and then she slipped.

I don't know if I put something into her mind. But do things you enjoy. Get out, do things.

If you like kayaking, borrow someone's kayak and go kayaking or buy your own. You can get some quite cheap kayaks. If you love swimming, make the swimming work for you.

Dive up and down a few times, splash, get into deeper water and just kind of tread water. And I'll tell you, if you get in water and do some tread water and do these arms out, up and down, back and forth, do the legs back and forth, out, one leg out and back, one leg out and back, you're going to actually make your body work hard. So you can go in the water and have a swim.

If you're in our cold water, just watch you numb and then enjoy it. But if you're in warmer water, good on you. And you know what, sometimes when it comes to strength training, I know how good it is for people because I see the end results and their bodies work so much better for them.

If you're kind of thinking, I've got a plan to do strength training today, you get up in the morning, you feel a bit tired, you kind of go, no, I'm not going to do it. Can I challenge you? Do this small little habit for yourself.

Just do five minutes. It's amazing after five minutes how you want to keep going because you're feeling so good. So just make the habit of starting it and make a certain amount of days, you know, times per day, days per week.

Yes. Oh, my friend's got some bite stuff, but I don't need it. I'll put it on it in a minute.

And then, you know, I would say if you're a person that loves to walk, add to your walk. So when you're out walking, make yourself power up heels, put a backpack on your back with probably not water like this, but get some milk cartons and throw in your backpack, make it work harder for you. And then come home at the end of your walk, do 10 minutes of strength training where you're working the upper body.

Because walking, because we're not challenging our body to do much stuff, your walking will only do so much. And after a while, your body will adapt to it. So come home and do some simple stuff like, you know, you may get onto the, you know, the, just to do some upper body stuff.

So just do some push-ups here. Make sure you don't arch your back, just pushing up and down. I can see some water leaking.

Might have to have a look at the water leaking down there after some on. So just some push-ups, you know, you may want to do one-legged squats. So here you're trying to sit back into it.

So I've got something to hold on to here. So just down and up, one-legged squats. This came in handy for my friend yesterday when she broke a leg and we needed to get down further down the mountain or she would have had to be winched off the mountain.

She had to go on one leg while she wasn't able to put the other leg down. So this came in really handy for her doing some stuff into. And, you know, we can do some tricep dips.

So it's really simple stuff that you could be doing. There's so much more than that, but that's just an idea. So go out for your walk, but come home and do 10 minutes of strength training.

You will feel the difference. So restore small decisions with your sleep. I'm someone that loves nighttime.

I will often just keep going with stuff until 12 o'clock at night and I go, oh no, oh dear, I let the day go by. And now I have to try and get up in the morning to train someone at eight. So I'm only going to get this many hours sleep.

Then I lie in bed and worry about it. So I try to, I'm not always great at this, but I try to make some small habits there where I've made myself go to bed at a certain time, by about 10.30 so I'm not in bed so late. So you can make small habits with your sleep.

And stretching, you know, yeah, just, you know, after a workout, just make that a daily, like a habit that you do every time. You work out, you stretch, you work out, you stretch, you walk, you stretch, you weed, you stretch. I had to hold my arm up for two hours yesterday while my friend used my arm to support herself.

So my arm was a bit sore last night, so I stretched it. So making those just the habits that when you work out, you stretch, when you work out, you stretch. So just, this is the restore part, just nurture relationships as well.

Have relationships that mean something to you, that you nurture. So sometimes I'll be really slack and I'll get in touch with a good friend after months and months and months of not being in touch with them. But again, I try and get together with them.

So my friend that lives in Queensland, we're hoping to get together in a and it's wonderful. So nurture relationships is part of the restore thing. And it doesn't take much to send someone a text saying, hey, how are you?

Just thinking of you and miss you, doesn't take much. So nurture relationships are important and they get our head in a great place. Believe, so set a habit for the week.

So I think that it's as simple as that. Where do you go with habits? Week by week, make a new habit.

So you make a list of all the things you want to achieve and then take the first most important one of those and set your habit for week one. Go right, week one. At this point in time, I don't drink enough water and I drink way too much soft drinks.

So maybe your habit for week one can be, I'm going to drink more water and I'm not going to buy soft drinks. They're not going to be in my fridge. So I'm not going to be tempted to go there.

And if I go out for a meal, I won't order a soft drink. So that can be your habit one. You don't, what, what we've been thinking about and talking about too is you, you don't want to, you don't, it's really hard sometimes for us if we feel we have to give up a habit, but if we create new habits, as we go along, those new habits take over and we don't feel like.

I'm almost at the end anyway, set the habit for the week and follow it as much as possible but don't stress if you don't stick to it 100%. Don't forget a habit is a small change and small changes can be new to us but if you pop in a little change it becomes a big change over time.

Time management as well, so if you have a plan, you know, to do your exercise on certain days and, you know, get together with friends on certain days, I think that can be huge. I know people have said before they like to be spontaneous but I think sometimes that just particularly when you've got a lot going on in life, having a plan can be hugely beneficial and stress management, so that micro time out, I think I talked about that before, having that two minutes here and five minutes there is wonderful. And just re-going back over, a habit is one of those small changes we make so it's something you do often and regularly, sometimes without knowing you're even doing it.

And it's really important just to add one thing at a time, don't take five habits and put them all in the same day. Add one habit at a time, week one maybe or you may need to go two weeks with that first habit because it's not quite in there yet, you haven't done it enough times. Then when you feel that's on track, go to the next habit, tick off your list of things that you want to do.

So if you want to get fitter, if you want to lose weight, I don't like going to the lose weight things because not all of us want to do that. So let's just go, I want to get fitter and stronger, I want to see my mother-in-law or mother maybe more often, I need to really put the food in my fridge. Let's just work on one of those for this week, maybe say let's work on the food in my fridge because it's right now stocked with full of chocolate and cakes and chips and all that sort of stuff.

Maybe focus on that one as your first one and follow that, just small decisions, I'm not going to buy it for a start. If stuff is in there, I'm going to give it away or throw it away, don't eat it before you start. And then week two could be, okay, I'm going to start to now put some things into my weekly life that will get me stronger.

Week three could be, okay, I'm going to ring up my mother and see her at least once a week because if she doesn't live too far away. So there's little things, it's not huge, it's small things, but over time they'll create the you that you want to be. So it's no major things, you don't need to follow an eight-week course or a 12-week course or a four-week course, you can actually put in your own habits.

Work them out today, just get down together with what's important in your life and just start to make some changes. Okay, have fun with that, play around with it and look forward to hearing back from you if you've been able to make some changes over the next few weeks. We'd love to hear back from you, put a comment on this post down here.