Friday with Heidi: That feel good feeling…

This week I’ve been able to share the health and well-being love with a couple of local networking groups.

I always say yes to these opportunities. It’s a great chance to meet other business owners and also to hone my skills in presenting in a fixed amount of time.

On Tuesday I was at the Woodley Business Club and on Thursday I was at the Athena Ascot meeting. I spoke about the same thing at both – how to care for yourself as a business owner, but the message applies to all of us whether you run a business or not and so I thought I’d share some of the basics with you.

As humans, our life experiences are made up of a series of events you either remember really strongly because they made you feel amazing or because they left you feeling wretched. Our emotions and feelings around events create memory, we don’t tend to remember the normal and mundane, it’s just that, normal.

Also when people come to see me at the start of their Fit Camp journey they’ll say things like “I just want to feel better“, so I created an acronym to help people remember where to focus when changing how they feel about their health and happiness.

F | Food

Despite what you might want to believe you just can’t improve your health, well-being or happiness if you aren’t eating a good diet most of the time. Stop kidding yourself that you deserve the chocolate because you worked hard. Remove the thought from your bonce that you are the exception to the rule on how many veggie portions a day are required for health and definitely start to put your health in your mouth and eat a better diet. The impact is quick and rewarding.

E | Exercise

After food making sure that you move your body each day needs to be on your to do list. It doesn’t have to be full blown exercise every day, but a walk each day will make the difference between you feeling foggy headed and sluggish to feeling more alert and energised. When choosing what to do to move yourself, do something you love. If the thought of joining a gym leaves you cold, don’t do it! Go dancing, walking, or swimming. Once again, remove the idea from your head that you are one of the lucky ones for whom exercise doesn’t need to be an essential part of your life. The quotation on our Facebook page reads “there have been no antidepressants that have been shown to impact the brain in as many positive ways as exercise can” – In the words of Nike ‘just do it’.

L | Lifestyle

Your lifestyle choices can make or break a good food and exercise regime. If you don’t get enough sleep you’ll struggle to keep the first two going. If you drink alcohol each night as a regular occurrence it will affect your sleep and then your ability to work and think optimally the next day. If you spend a lot of time of social media you can find yourself in a state of constant comparison with others who you think have it better than you and this can lead to low mood, which may encourage poorer food choices. Upgrade your choices.

T | Team 

Who you spend your time with will directly impact your results. And at both the meetings this week this one became the hot topic. One chap in Woodley told us that he really noticed the effect one member of his committee was having on the other members. Once the person left, the whole group changed and became more productive. At Ascot one of the ladies shared with us how when she decided to reduce her alcohol consumption her friends were the toughest to get around, making her feel like the pariah for not joining in. She felt quite indignant that she was the one who wanted to improve herself and they wouldn’t support her.

Think about who you spend time with and how you affect each other. Whether you are the odd one out or the one saying ‘go on, just have one’ you can change your response in these situations.

How do we do this though we certainly don’t want overwhelm by focusing in on all four areas? 

Chose one and decide to improve it by 1%. I’ve spoken about this before but the best things need repeating.

1% your life. 

Chances are that if you’ve read this from me before and things are the same, you’ve not yet one-percented.

It’s easy not to do it because the impact for NOT doing it is insignificant today. However if you had done this when you first heard about it you’d be seeing the benefit now.

1% of your day is 14 minutes. What would 14 minutes walking each day have done for you?

What would 14 minutes more sleep each night done for you?

How would 1% more water every week for 3 months improved things?

If you’d saved 1% of your salary each month would you have had a little stash by now that you could use for your holiday?

1% always feels not worth it in the moment, but the cumulative effect is massive.

Decide today to 1% something for the next 30 days and see how you get on. Let me know how it goes and if you need help with it just ask.

My own 1% is tweaking my diet again to improve my health and bring my Hashimoto’s into remission. Last week I went to have a food sensitivity test and this is how I got on.