3 BIG changes to my habits (two out, one in!)

Hey, welcome to the Daniel Clough Podcast. I'm Daniel Clough, and on this podcast I cover the power of building foundational health habits in your life. I also share strategies that can help you build your own foundational health habits so that you can become the best version of yourself. And yeah, there are some big changes with my foundational health habits. 2 are out and I'm bringing a brand new one in. In this episode, I explain each of these and why I believe this leaves me with a much stronger set of now 7 foundational health habits. Enjoy the episode. Today I wanted to bring you up to speed on 3 big changes I've made to my foundational health habits recently. And don't worry, this title wasn't clickbait. I am talking about big changes here. I've dropped 2 of my habits and I'm bringing in a brand new one. And what I love about this is that my foundational health habit strategy is evolving and tightening up as I get further into the journey. And I'm more than willing to make changes to keep improving things. And by the way, I don't make changes to my habits lightly. Whether it's changing my target with a particular habit, dropping one entirely, or bringing on a new one, there's often months of reflecting before making changes like this. So I'm really excited about these recent changes. It takes everything up a whole nother couple of levels, and I'm super confident that this is a much stronger set of habits for me now. So let's get into the changes. I've already mentioned I've dropped 2 habits and I've brought in a brand new one, and I'm going to start with the habits that I've dropped. The first habit that I've dropped is supplements. Now, when I first introduced this habit, I took quite a large number of supplements every day. I think it was like 8 different ones and over 20 pills and capsules every day. And I believed it was important to hold myself accountable for taking these on a daily basis. However, over time, my stance on supplements has shifted quite a bit. And nowadays, I actually take very few supplements. I've stripped it right back to just a few that I think are good for me. And as it stands, these are the 4 that I take: a protein powder, creatine monohydrate, magnesium, and Athletic Greens. Now, the reason I choose to take these 4 supplements is because they each serve a specific and important need of mine at the moment. For example, I use a protein powder when I'm having a day where I'm struggling to get to my daily 150 grams of protein. It's sort of a break glass strategy. I pull it out when I need it. Creatine is probably one of the most researched and proven supplements to support gaining strength and muscle. So this one is super relevant to my goals right now. Magnesium I take to help improve my sleep. And Athletic Greens is essentially a high-quality multivitamin, and I sort of see it as an insurance policy. Of course, I try to eat a diet of mostly whole foods, and I try to get as much variation in as I can. But knowing that I also get plenty of vitamins and minerals through supplementation, it just makes me more confident that I'm covering all of my bases. So look, I absolutely believe these 4 supplements are worthwhile.— but worthwhile is not the same as foundational. And the world isn't going to stop if I miss taking them for a day or two. Probably even a week or two won't make much of a difference. And if I had to lose them all tomorrow, I could still push on and keep becoming a healthier person without them. So therefore, taking supplements doesn't feel foundational, and I can't put it on the same shelf as the likes of sleep, alcohol, protein, etc. Now, I'll still aim to take my supplements daily, but I'm not going to track it every day and I'm not going to stress if I don't manage it. And this means I'm going to remove supplements as a foundational health habit from now. So that's supplements. And now on to the second habit that I'm removing: intermittent fasting. This has been a hard habit to remove because it served me so well up until this point. And it served me so well for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it's helped me develop a healthier relationship with food. I'm now very self-aware and I'm very intentional with my eating. —compared to a few years ago where I would just unintentionally graze throughout the day. I feel like I've taken back control of my relationship with food. Secondly, it's helped me better control my calorie intake. I've always been very indulgent when it comes to food. Once I start eating, I find it very hard to stop. So pushing out the first bite of food until the afternoon, and making the eating window smaller, it's really helped me with this. And it's often been the difference between effortlessly being able to hit, say, 2,500 calories, to easily blowing upwards of 3,000 or 4,000 calories. So you might ask, why the hell am I removing intermittent fasting as a foundational health habit then? Well, recently I've been fasting less anyway. Since I've become more focused on building muscle, I now choose to eat breakfast on weight training days so that I can have some food in me before a training session. And that means I've only been aiming for 80% consistency for the 18 or so days left in the month outside of that. And for the days that I'm not fasting, I find I don't have the problems I used to have. I can still maintain a very good relationship and discipline with food. And I'm pretty consistent with hitting my calorie goals on these days too. And you know what? I've started to really like having a whole food, high protein breakfast to kick off the day. So much so that I've been finding myself wanting to do that more than 20% of the time on those 18 days or so I'm supposed to be fasting. So I figure, why keep sticking to this as a foundational health habit, when it's not actually solving a problem for me, and if it's not critical to improving my long-term health. Now, I want to make it clear: by removing intermittent fasting as a health habit, that doesn't mean that I won't ever intermittently fast again. Sometimes it's nice just to get going for the day and not to have, have to worry about food. And now and again, it's just a nice flex to remind my body that I'm in control. It's also a great tool for when you know you're eating out at a restaurant, or if you have a high-calorie dinner ahead of you. It's a great damage control strategy. So I'll still intermittently fast from time to time. I'm just happy to be a bit more flexible with it nowadays. And I'll actually expect I'll probably end up fasting maybe 2, maybe even 3 times a week going forward, even if I'm not tracking it. And of course, if I find myself going backwards on my relationship with food, or in being able to stick to my calorie target for the day, I always have the option to bring it back in as a foundational health habit again. But I think I'm going to be okay. And at this stage, I just can't really justify it as a foundational health habit. It's more something that was important for me at one point in time and will continue to be useful as a tool when I need to use it. So that's it for the habits that are out: supplements and intermittent fasting. So what's the new habit? Welcome, whole foods. I brought whole foods in as a new habit for February, and it's something I've been thinking about for a while now. There's just no question that ultra-processed foods are horrible for your health. In fact, the British Medical Journal did an umbrella review of 45 studies that looked at the relationship between ultra-processed foods and adverse health outcomes. And by the way, I'll link that umbrella review from the medical, uh, journal in the show notes. They found convincing evidence that supported direct associations between ultra-processed foods and higher risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, as well as anxiety and common mental disorders. And they also found highly suggestive evidence that linked ultra-processed foods to higher risk of incident all-cause mortality— that's basically fancy science speak for dying of pretty much anything— type 2 diabetes, depressive outcomes, together with high risk of adverse sleep-related outcomes, wheezing, and obesity. So the huge and undeniable health benefits you get from eating a mostly whole food diet is in itself a cast-iron reason for bringing it in as a foundational health habit. But I also know how I feel when I eat mostly whole foods. It's very tangible for me to see and feel. I feel lighter, leaner, less bloated, less achy, which probably means there's less inflammation going on, less tired, and I'm generally sharper in my mind too. I have less anxiety, and I just feel in a better mood. And I know when I get stuck in a rut of eating ultra-processed foods for a couple of days, I quickly begin to feel lousy. And I don't want to feel lousy. I want to feel good. So this is why whole foods is making its way in as one of my foundational health habits. Now, the goal I'm setting myself when it comes to whole foods is to have 80% of my calories be whole foods, allowing myself 20% leniency. And the whole foods definition can be a little bit fuzzy, and it's admittedly open to interpretation. I will cover my own definition of whole foods in a future episode, but for now I'll summarise it as, for the most part, foods that tend to have one ingredient. And the foods that haven't been heavily processed. So that's stuff like meat and fish, vegetables, fruits, nuts, milk, eggs, potatoes, oats, stuff like that. And it's avoiding the obvious ultra-processed foods such as ready meals, cakes, biscuits, ice creams, chocolate bars. Yeah, all the stuff that tastes really great. But even things that might not be quite so obvious, stuff like fruit-flavored yogurts, instant soups, fizzy drinks, mass-produced white bread, breakfast cereals, and bars. These things are often marketed as being healthy, but if you look on the back of the package, there's often a huge number of ingredients and a load of rubbish in them. And as with all of my habits, my ultimate goal is to be able to achieve this 80% of the time over the course of a month. And man, I have some work to do here. I only achieved 45% consistency in my first month of tracking it. So this is easily going to be my biggest challenge with my habits in 2024. So watch this space as I look to get that up to 80% consistency. And that's it. Supplements and intermittent fasting are out, and whole foods are in. I'll of course continue to keep reflecting on all of my foundational health habits and will reserve the right to change and improve things in the future. And you'll be the first to hear of it when I do.