Daniel Clough reviews his March 2024 adherence to seven health habits: alcohol 100%, sleep 90%, protein 94%, caffeine 84%, water 84%, steps 87%, and whole foods 48%. He's sticking with these same habits all year without adding new ones, aiming for 80% consistency across the board.
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. In today's episode, I look at how I did with my 7 foundational health habits in March. This is something that I do every month to hold myself accountable and to see what learnings I can take forward into the following month. And hopefully you will find some of the insights useful for your own journey in building foundational health habits. All right, welcome to the habit review for March 2024. Now, my goals for March were the same as January and February, and they're going to be the same for the rest of the year. That's because I've committed to tripling down on my existing foundational health habits this year and to not start anything new. I want to see a huge green wave on my 6 habits: alcohol, sleep, protein, caffeine, water, and steps. I want absolutely no doubt that I can keep these green every month going forward. Now I'm kind of close to that, but there are some weak spots across some of them that I definitely need to fix. My other goal is to get my 7th habit, which is whole foods, to 80% consistency. Now I hope this can be done in 2024, but it's still early days, and I know that this is going to be my toughest challenge to date, so we'll see. And one of the things I've realized about building foundational health habits is that you have to be patient. In fact, it's one of the 5 rules that I outlined in my previous episode, 5 Rules to Build Rock Solid Habits. Things will take as long as they're going to take, and simply setting a fixed goal for when you want something in place, it's not going to force the matter. It's much better to simply be clear about your focus and then just settle into the process. Just put the work in every day every week, and every month and keep building. And if you stay focused and you work hard, you'll get to where you want as fast as you can. With all of that said, let's see how I actually did in March. March was an amazing month for me. I hit 80% consistency for the 6 health habits I'm trying to keep green, and you just can't ask for more than that. I should also note that I had a few challenges to overcome in March. I had a work offsite, we had Easter, and yeah, chocolate eggs are kind of my kryptonite. I have a massive sweet tooth. As well as it's also the start of half term for schools. So there was a lot of irregularity going on, um, in towards the end of March. Luckily, I made such a strong start to the month that some slips towards the end of the month didn't make much of a difference overall. But let's take things one by one. Alcohol, of course, was 100%. Always will be. But as you know, I like to keep it there anyway. Sleep was a super impressive 90% consistency. I had only 3 misses for the entire month, and all of those were because of an unusual either late night or an early start that it was hard to work around. And I'm noticing that I'm actually starting to really settle into a consistent sleep and wake time now, and that is what seems to be making all of the difference. Protein was at 94%, and this one is just super easy for me now. If I ever miss my protein goal, it's usually because I'm traveling or maybe I'm out for the day, and it just is harder to hit that number. And because my average is usually upwards of 180 grams anyway, I don't really stress about missing it now and again, as long as I can just keep my 80%. In fact, now that 150 grams of protein per day is easy for me, I'm going to raise the target to 175 grams. And that's because 175 grams is my gold standard, because— well, it's always been the gold standard that I've been aiming towards, because it equates to a gram of protein per pound of body weight. Now this is going to make things a little bit tighter, but I don't see any issue with being able to hit 175 grams and keep my consistency above 80%. But look, let's see how things pan out in April. I'm cautiously confident. Caffeine was at 84%. Not much to say here. It's super easy to keep caffeine above 80%, and every miss was a strategic loosening of the rule to either just help with a bit of energy pre-workout or to fit in with some traveling. Water was also at 84%. Again, not a gigantic amount to say here. I always feel comfortable being able to hit over 80% with my water. The main point to note is that I'm still working on being able to do this more smoothly, and I talk a bit more about that in an episode a couple ago, Habit Hack: An Easy Way to Start or Improve a Habit. Next up, steps. Now, steps, I hit 87%, and that's probably my proudest achievement in March. It's not my highest number, but if you think about it, this is the first time I've been in agreement with this habit for 6 months, and also at 87%, comfortably above the 80% mark. I feel I've turned a bit of a corner with steps recently, actually. With some changes to my routine, I feel more confident in being able to hit over 80% every month from now on. So now it kind of falls into the same category as sleep. I need to work on achieving it more smoothly, as it's often a rush towards the end of the day to make it over the line. And lastly, let's save the worst for last, I guess. Whole Foods. Now, Whole Foods is the new habit that I'm working on. And here I managed a small increase from 45% last month to 48% this month. But look, it's so small, I'm just going to go ahead and call that one flat. And if I'm honest, I haven't really done the work of trying to figure out some strategies of making the leap to 60% and 70% yet. And I'm kind of happy for this one just to tread baseline whilst I focus on smoothing out my water and my steps habit. Plus, March and April have a lot of irregular stuff going on in them. The bulk of the 2-week half term, there's a little bit of overnight travel going on, and it's just going to make it really hard to improve upon this habit at, at this moment anyway. So that leads me nicely to my focus for April. Basically, I want the same again. I want to see those 6 habits— alcohol, sleep, protein, caffeine, water, and steps— all above 80% and in the green again. That would be a fantastic step in the right direction given my goals for 2024, and it would also be a decent achievement given the irregularity of April. And I think what I'll do for Whole Foods is I'll just let it settle where it wants to settle in April, which by the way might even be worse than February and March because of a lot of that irregularity. And then I'll start to turn my attention of how I can get that up to 60% and 70% thereafter. All right, I think that is about it for March. I'm really happy with how the month went, and I'm really looking forward to have another month like that in April and then to build upon things thereafter. So I will see you in about a month's time where I reflect how I did in April. Cheers.
