Habit Review: July 2024 (it got bumpy!) #healthhabits #discipline #consistency

Okay, welcome to another monthly habit review episode. So as per usual, before I get stuck into the detail of the month and how well I did in July, I want to just do a little bit of a recap on what my goals for the month were. So my goals were twofold. First of all, the 6 habits that I fairly firmly established. So there's alcohol, sleep, protein, caffeine, water, and steps. I wanted to keep them rock solid at 80% consistency and in the green. And then for my 7th habit, which is whole foods, and I'm in the early stages of building that habit, my goal is for that to be above 50% again, which would make it a 3rd consecutive month of being over 50%. And preferably I wanted to see it closer to 60%, but really getting it over 50% so I can get that 3rd consecutive month of being over 50%. That's the main goal. The 60% is a kind of stretch goal. So with that said, let's jump into how I did in July. So I'm going to flash something up on my screen. If you are watching the video version of this, you'll be able to kind of see how well I did visually. So as you can see, July, it wasn't a super great month. Okay, it's probably not too fair. I think it's fair to say that I probably just had a bit of a wobble in July. So of the 6 foundational health habits I wanted to keep 80% consistency or over and in the green, I only managed to keep 4 of them in the green. And that was alcohol, which you would expect, protein, caffeine, and water. So I'm super happy with those 4 habits nicely in the green. The 2 habits that slipped below 80% were sleep and steps. Not by much. Sleep was 74%. And 10,000 steps was 77%. So only just below the 80% line. But I'm not so happy with those and we'll get into that in a few moments. And then for my 7th foundational health habit, whole foods, that came in at 52%. And I'm fairly happy with that because as I mentioned a minute ago, that means I managed to be over 50% now for 3 consecutive months when it comes to whole foods. And that's a pretty good place to be given, given the fact that I'm in the very early stages of building it. So overall, I would say July was pretty mixed. So let's dive into the details. And for now, I'm going to switch off the main view and I will share— I'm going to share my tick sheet for July, which gives you a little bit more detail on kind of how I did day to day. So Where are we? So first of all, no alcohol. Of course, as you can see, a tick for every single day. It's always gonna be 100% consistency. I've been sober for, what are we, August? I've been sober for over 3 years now. My 3-year anniversary actually was like mid-July. So, you know, I keep it on there because I would always keep it on there. I wanna hold myself accountable to being 100% and it's a nice visual reminder. I do not drink anymore. And of course, it's one of my most foundational health habits, but you would always expect it to be 100%. So no problems there. Sleep is where it starts to get a little bit hairy. So sleep over 6.5 hours came in at 74%. You can see that it's just a bunch of crosses that are dotted throughout the month. No double misses. So that was quite good. But what would I put that down to? Well, I think a couple of things. One, I think I just lost my focus a little bit. I had a bad start to the month where I clocked up 3 misses already by the 9th of the month, and I think I just lost my focus with it. There were easily 2 or 3 there that I could have avoided by just getting an earlier night or allowing myself a bit of an extra lay-in. And then the other thing, not trying to make excuses, but it's summer, it's hot, the light is coming through the windows really early. So I always find it harder to kind of keep my sleep habit throughout the summer just because I don't sleep as comfortably when it's hot. You tend to get less sleep throughout the night and more disturbances. And I don't know, I just find that I'm more tempted to stay up a little bit later and I'm more likely to get up a little bit earlier because the sun is getting up much earlier. So I'm not going to beat myself up too much. 74% is still worry. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. It was 2 more misses than I can afford. 8 misses, really. I can only afford 6.. But I think with that extra bit of focus for the next few months as well as coming out of the summer, I think, I think I'm going to be totally fine. So the next habit was protein, which is eating 175 grams of protein each day, 81%, as you can see from the ticks. Again, just 6, my 6 misses that I can afford, I got. Usually I would expect protein to be a little bit higher than 81%., but actually it doesn't matter. Anything above 80% is a win and in the green. You know me, I'm a big 80/20 guy. Difference between 80/20, 90/10, 85/15, it doesn't make that much difference. It's only when you go below that 80% threshold that it starts to get worrisome. So I'm quite happy with 81%. I'm pretty sure protein will bounce back up to kind of 90% like it usually is, um, over the next few months. Um, there are just a kind of few trips going on in July where I found that a little bit harder to get my protein in. Um, but look, that's no excuse. Usually it would— I'd expect it to be 90% plus. But anyway, 81%, in the green, no problem at all. The next one is caffeine. So, um, caffeine came in at 81% as well. Um, again, exactly the same as protein, perfectly fine by me. I pushed the boat out and had a few extra coffees whilst I was traveling throughout July on some weekend trips, etc. A couple of extra ones to kind of fuel an afternoon workout here or there. Very intentional to not make it more than 8— sorry, not make it more than 6 misses for the month. So I came in kind of clean at 81% there, which is totally fine by me. No problem with caffeine. Caffeine, easy. Protein, easy. I never really expect to have a bad month on those anymore. The next one is water, drinking 3 liters of water, 94%. Super happy with that. As you can see, like I only got 2 misses. I find it incredibly easy to hit 3 liters. My water kind of cadence throughout the day is very good. It's just my most— other than alcohol, it's my most firmly established habit now. But I would always expect to see it over 90%. It's just very much a second nature thing for me to be drinking 3 to 4 liters throughout the day now. So 94%, super happy with that. 10K steps, um, 77%, um, so 7 misses, one more than I could afford. Um, yeah, not great. Um, really with steps, just losing my focus. Um, it shouldn't be too hard to get 10,000 steps per day. Um, and I think most of those days I've just got a lot of memory of leaving it too late in the day, a bit like I am today. It's kind of like 5:45 PM, I know I've got a clean 60 to 90 minutes to do a walk after this recording, so I'm going to be fine. But it's always very dangerous if I leave my steps till later on in the day. If I get up early, get some good steps in like 4,000 or 5,000, 4,000 or 5,000 usually come naturally by the end of the day and I'm fine. But in July I just left it too late in the day too often. So like sleep, don't really have the summer to complain about because actually it's easier to get steps in the summer because the weather's warm. But like sleep, I lost my focus. I allowed myself to not clock many steps up until it got quite late into the afternoon, early evening. And then from there I usually will miss my target. So for me, it's got— I've got to clean up my focus on steps and get that back to 80% next month. And then the last one, whole foods, 52%. You know, the goal there, and this is my target for whole foods, is to eat 80% whole foods per day. And then obviously my month consistency, I'm looking for over 50% and I got that 52%. Again, with whole foods, you can see it's very mixed, you know, like tick, cross, tick, cross, cross, cross, tick, tick. Like it's, it's just very patchy. It's hard, man. It's really, really hard to eat over 80% whole foods. You know, if you think about it, a lot of what we eat is not whole foods. Whole foods is meat, fruit, veg, nuts, seeds, you know, some dairy. That's about it. Everything else is classified as a non-whole food. So you've only got to have like a dinner where it has like, you know, a chicken Kiev or like something out of a packet and you've just lost your 80% for the day for the most part. Given I eat about 2000 calories a day, you know, it only takes 400 calories of a non-whole food and I blow my 80%. So I've got, I've got a little bit of thinking to do about that. The one thing I will say is that generally speaking, my whole foods is much better than it used to be. I also track my percentage over the week and even though you can see here, I only hit 80% each day, 52% of the time, but actually across the week, my percentage of whole foods I'm eating is around 70%. It's just that I'm not able to kind of like it might spread across the days in an uneven manner. So, and that used to be around 40 to 50%. So I've definitely improved my ability to eat more whole foods. I've now got to get to the point where I take that 50%, you know, I've got 3 consecutive months now over 50%. I've now got to make a concerted effort to get that to 60% and then to 70%. And, you know, that's just going to really, really require me to tighten things up. You know, those dinners that kind of blow it into kind of 70% Whole Foods instead of the 80. I've got to try and avoid some of those. I've got to try and avoid some of the weekend splurging, etc. So I'm pretty sure like just some general tightening up is what's going to get me to kind of 60, mid-60s, um, and then we'll have to see where I go from there. But for the time being, 52%, third consecutive month that I've hit over 50%. The three before that, I've done 6 months in total for Whole Foods where like 30s and 40s, etc. So, you know, in the grand scheme of things, that's definitely progress and things are pointing in the right direction. But I've now got to sort of try and get myself out of this pattern of just over 50% and get it into 60%. And that's what I'll be focusing on for the rest of the year. Cool. Let me stop sharing my screen there. So wrapping up July, yes, I had a fairly mixed result. In July and it definitely could have been better. But I have to remind myself that this will sometimes happen now and again. I'm going to have to take it on the chin that established foundational health habits will fall under 80% consistency and into the orange now and again. And I think the most important thing to remember is that a blip on a habit for one month, so it coming under 80%, is definitely not a trend. It's just a blip. And realistically, that is just going to happen sometimes.. It might happen through me losing my focus or maybe through curveballs that life is going to deal with me or sorry, deal me from time to time. But what's important is that I make sure that that blip does not turn into a trend because I think if it slips into 2 consecutive misses under 80% and into the orange, that becomes the start of a trend. And then if I'm going to hit 3 consecutive misses, so 3 under 80%, that definitely then becomes a trend, which is not what I want. These 6 health targets that I've firmly established. I've got to keep them mostly in green and over 80%, with just the odd blip here or there, and never a double or triple month miss. So I've got my work cut out for me in August and September, I guess, to make sure that that's true. And I'm going to— exactly, that's exactly what I'm going to do. I'm going to pick myself up, I'm going to focus extra hard on things for the next few months. I'm going to really think about my focus and some of the things related to steps and sleep that I know could pull it back into the green, as well as other habits, keep them in the green and just make sure that, you know, these two misses are just a one-off blip. So lastly, my goals for August. August is going to look a bit strange. It usually does. I'm on holiday for 10 days in August, so I'm going to do something a little custom with the month. I'm going to, whilst I'm on holiday, only focus on steps and water only. They're the only habits I'm going to track. And aim to keep it over 80%. Usually I would track sleep too, but this time I'm going to run a bit of an experiment where I'm not tracking sleep because I'm not going to take my Whoop sleep tracker away on holiday with me. But I am going to be very mindful of it and I think that naturally it will fall over 6.5 hours anyway. Sleep is not usually a problem for me when I'm on holiday. I don't have massively late nights. I tend to have nice lie-ins, so I'm not particularly worried about my sleep falling into a really bad place. And look, I'm gonna be mindful of it. I'll probably do some manual calculating in my head to make sure that I've got roughly 6.5, but importantly, I'm not gonna track it. I'm only gonna track steps, 10,000 a day, and water, 3 liters a day. I just wanna make sure that I've got a baseline level of activity with the steps and that I keep myself hydrated in the hot weather. Everything else I am not tracking. And then September will be back to normal. And by the way, I've done a dedicated episode called How I Track My Foundational Habits on Holiday. And there I cover the principles that I kind of, you know, for how I think about tracking my foundational health habits on holiday as well as my very specific goals for August. So you might want to go back to episode 18 and check that out. Cool. I will see you next month in September and we will see how well I did in August. Thanks.