Habit Review: May 2024 (Now, that's how you do it!)
In episode 15 of the Daniel Clough Podcast, Daniel records his first solo video episode, using it as a live experiment to improve his video podcasting skills. He reviews his performance on seven foundational health habits for May 2024, reporting consistency percentages for each: Alcohol (100%), Sleep (81%), Protein (87%), Caffeine (81%), Water (94%), Steps (81%), and Whole Foods (55%). He reflects on what went well, notes occasional challenges (e.g., weather affecting steps, late‑day water intake affecting sleep), and celebrates that all six established habits stayed above his 80% target while Whole Foods crossed the 50% threshold for the first time. Daniel then outlines his goals for June: maintain the six habits above 80% and raise Whole Foods to at least 60%, ideally 70% or higher. He shares a specific mental hack for Whole Foods—asking “Will I feel ashamed after eating this?”—and describes how this question helped him reject less‑healthy options. He also mentions a broader realization that whole‑food nutrition directly impacts his energy, appearance, and performance. The episode ends with a call for viewer feedback on the video format and a preview of a future June review episode.
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All right, welcome to episode 15 of the Daniel Clough Podcast. So a quick warning, today's episode is going to look and feel a little bit different. And if you're watching on YouTube, you would have already guessed by now that this is a video episode, and it's my first ever solo video episode. And I've been thinking about this for a while, and I decided that rather than trying to fret and make everything perfect, I'm just going to shoot it today and see how it comes out. And I'm sure there's going to be a bunch of things like eye level, background. I'm going to be looking at several documents on the screen, so I'm not sure how that's going to feel. And probably a whole bunch of other stuff that's just going to feel a bit janky, and there will be obvious room for improvement on quite a few things. But I figured the best way of getting better is just to jump into it with two feet, and then every single week I can review it and make small improvements. And hopefully within the next couple of months, I'll get to the point where these video podcasts feel like pretty smooth. And look, if you want the audio-only version of me and don't want to look at me on video, then you could just stick to Spotify, Apple, and you won't have to look at the video. There's their audio-only versions. And to add to that, I'm also going to have less of a script for this episode. I'm just going to talk around things a little bit more naturally. And again, this is something I want to start doing a little bit more of, and I figured the best way of doing that is just to jump into it, reflect on how it feels and looks, and basically just try and get better each week. So today's episode is where I look back on a previous month to see how I did with my 7 foundational health habits. I'm going to cover the month as a whole, but then I'm also going to dive into each habit separately. And then at the end, I will reflect on the learnings for this month and I'll go on to set some goals for the following month. So a quick reminder of what my goals were for last month, which was May 2024. My goal was for my 6 habits that are firmly established. I wanted to keep those at 80% or over, basically in the green.. And then for my 7th habit that I'm in the process of building, which is whole foods, I wanted to see that over 50%. And that fits with my goals for my habits actually for the entire of the year. I want my 6 habits that I've established just to kind of stay in the green, really cement them and keep them over 80%. And I want my newest habit, whole foods, which is currently under 50% for the last 3 or 4 months that I've started it. I want that to— I want to build that to over 80%. Over the course of 2024. So drum roll, how did I do in May? Well, May was a great month, actually. It's been my best— well, actually, it's felt like my best month for a long, long time. My 6 habits that I have firmly established were over 80% and in the green. That's exactly what I wanted. And Whole Foods was 55%, which is a massive jump actually on the last 4 months. And again, exactly where I wanted to be. I wanted to get over that 50% threshold so I could then work in the second half 24 to really edge that from 50% to 80%. So I would consider that pretty much a smash hit of a month and exactly what I wanted to achieve. So let's dive into the details. So alcohol, same as always. Again, I'll always spend like 30 seconds on that, on no alcohol, just to point out the fact that it is one of my foundational health habits, but I've been sober for nearly 3 years now. It's always going to be 100%. If it is under 100%, there was something very seriously gone wrong and I don't ever expect that to be the case. But again, I'm going to always keep it on the docket. I'm going to always talk about it. But alcohol was at 100% and I expect to be sober for the rest of my life. Sleep. Sleep was actually very, very good. 81%. Again, nicely in the green. I had 6 misses throughout the month, which is to be expected. No 2 misses in a row. My average sleep was over 7 hours, so sleep was just exactly where it needs to be. Again, over time, I would like to get over to 7 hours, but just for now, I'm happy for the whole of 2024. If sleep can stay at over 80% for 6.5 hours, I'll be very, very, very happy. And for the month of May, 81% is just fine by me. Protein was at 87%. Again, no 2 misses on a row. Really good. I feel it. I feel very confident in being able to get my protein up over 175 grams every single day. It's actually just quite an easy thing for me to do now, and I would usually expect my protein consistency to be closer to 90% or over 90%. So 87% for the month of May is just fine. I'm really, really happy with that. Caffeine was at 81%. Virtually all of the times I miss caffeine, it's an intentional choice, and that's usually because I might be training in the afternoon and I want to have an espresso before my training session as a bit of a pre-workout, I guess, supplement or boost. Or I might be moving around, I might be traveling, and I just want that caffeine. And actually, I did a trip in May and two of my caffeine misses were on those two days as well. So caffeine Caffeine at 81%. Perfect. In the green. Very happy with it. Every single miss was an intentional one. So I've got really good control of my caffeine habit. Water, 94%. I find water so easy now. And actually, if I go back to even like the end of last year, I've always been over 80% with it. I've actually always been probably over about 90% with it, but More often lately, my challenge has been trying to consume most of my water before, say, like 6, 7 PM. Over the last few months, I've been leaving my water consumption towards the end of the day. That's not good. It means I have to get up in the night to go to the toilet. That then affects my sleep. So what I've been really trying to work on in May is to consume most of my water before, say, like at least 8 PM, to give myself a couple of hours of not drinking fluids before going to bed. And I feel like I'm getting there. It hasn't been perfect in May, but it's been feeling pretty good and for the most part I've been achieving that. So to hit 94%, be in the green, and to be making progress towards not drinking too much water at the end of the day, that's really good. So super happy with water. Steps. Steps came in at 81% and there's been a couple of double misses on the steps, mostly just because of crappy weather. You know, when it's been raining, it's been really hard. When I've been traveling, it's always a little bit hard. So actually my two double misses for the month, one was around when it was bad weather, another one was around when I was traveling. So actually in the grand scheme of things, 81%, super happy. Whenever it's over 80% and in the green, I'm always happy. Even if it's on the edge, like all of my habits, I'm trying to apply an 80/20 rule to. I don't need to be perfect. So 81% is just fine. And actually I'm even probably the most impressed. Actually, we'll get onto my next habit where I'm the most impressed, but actually I'm second impressed with steps because last month it did dip below 80% and it went to 73%. So I needed it to prove to myself that that was a blip. And I did exactly that. 81% is perfect for me. Whole Foods. This is where we get into where I feel my biggest win of the month was. And Whole Foods came in at 55%. Now, look, if I look back after that, I've been basically tracking this. This is the 4th month I've tracked this. And my goal, as with all of my other habits, is to get to the point where whole foods is over 80%. And by the way, my actual whole foods, like, daily goal is to be over 80% of whole foods. And then I want that to be 80% consistency over the course of the month as well. And it's actually very, very, very hard for me. I don't know if you track your foods to try and eat over 80% whole foods is actually quite a hard thing to do. And especially for somebody that has a bad relationship with food and also has a massive sweet tooth. So that on top of what is usually quite a hard thing to do just means it's a very, very challenging habit for me. And it's going to easily take at least the rest of the year and it might even slip into 2025 before I can get to the point where I feel I'm able to kind of get that habit like my other habits firmly established and expect to always hit over 80% with it. If I go back to February when I started, it was 45%. March was 48%. April dipped to 33%. And I think, like I said in the last episode, I haven't been really trying to improve it. I've just been letting my baseline form whilst I've been focusing on my 6 other habits. May was really the first month where I said, no, no, I'm going to make a lot more effort. I'm going to really try a few tactics to try and kind of get my whole foods over 50%. I need to now work on this and get over 50% as a baseline. So to hit 55% in May, super, super good. I'm really, really happy with that. And I hope that that now sets a benchmark for me to always be over 50% and start to get it into the 60s or 70s. And that was my overall goal is 80%. So that is Whole Foods. And yes, if I take a step back and look at the whole month, really, really, really happy. 6 of my habits over 80%. I've got 100% with no alcohol. I've got a nice 94% with water. Protein was 87%, so healthily in the green, and the rest of them were 81%. But again, perfectly in the green for me. And most impressively, my whole foods is now over 50%. So that really kind of sets a benchmark for me to go on and improve that. So an incredibly nice month and I'm really, really happy with May. And again, if I just do as a reminder, there was a half term in May, there was a little bit of travel. So I think to be able to achieve that in May, really, really happy. Now, if I look forward to June, I really want to achieve the same. I want to keep my 6 habits over 80%. So that's no alcohol, that's sleeping over 6.5 hours, that's eating 175 grams of protein, that's having a maximum of 2 cups of caffeine and never after 12 PM, that's drinking 3 liters of water and walking 10,000 steps per a day. I want to keep those habits over 80% and I want to get full, a full set of green habits for those 6 again in June. Again, that's my goal for the whole of the year. And then for whole foods, it came in at 55% for May. I really want to keep it at least over 50% to prove that that was not a blip. But I would like to see whole foods in the 60%, um, area. And there is one thing, all of the rest of that of the, the 6 habits that I've established, it's just the same as keep doing it. Like there's no like really specific strategies that I haven't already learned. It's just a matter of keep going with them. For whole foods, I am having to really think about some tactics and some very specific things that I need to focus on to be able to make that jump to 60% or 70%. And the big thing that came to me and I want to share with you is I listened to this on a podcast about a week ago and it's kind of like a small hack or a way of thinking. And it's really helped me, particularly in the last week, jump my whole foods consistency. And that's really— firstly, I was watching the CrossFit semifinals. I was looking to see how in shape they were. And it just really hit me that if I want to feel and if I want to look how I really want to look, I've got to get my nutrition game into a really good place. And for the most part, that means not eating too much. And I do track my calories and that's slightly outside of this. But actually a large part of that is making sure that mostly what I eat is whole foods. When I eat whole foods or mostly whole foods, I just feel amazing and everything starts to tighten up. And then as soon as I drift away from whole foods and eat poor foods, processed foods, you know, sweets and chocolates, I just tend to feel sluggish. I tend to feel lower energy and I start to look puffy. And literally this is like a 48-hour thing. If I have a weekend binge session where I'm eating crappy foods, I would finish Sunday just feeling sluggish and looking puffy. And then Monday and Tuesday eating mostly whole foods, it just goes away and I feel way more energetic. Of course, it's better for me from a health perspective. And again, I just— everything just starts to tighten up and I look less puffy. So I think I just had this realization towards the end of May that if I don't get this into a good place, I'm never really going to look and feel how I ultimately want to do. How I want to be. So I've got to nail this. I've got to get it to 80% by the end of the year, and I've got to keep it at least over 50% so that I can build that towards 80%. But then another little hack that I heard on this podcast as well was that every single time you go to pick up a food, I've just got to think and ask myself a couple of questions. Is this food going to move me towards my goal, or is it going to move me further away from my goal? And actually, one of the— an even more powerful question is, am I going to feel ashamed after eating this? Now, this just sounds kind of like a fairly trivial thing, but you'd be surprised in the last week, the amount of foods I've actually picked up and nearly eaten and then specifically asked myself, am I going to feel ashamed after I eat this? And then I've literally put the food back down and I could be like cleaning Fern, my daughter's plate away and thinking, shall I pick on the bits that she left over? Any parent will know that's like one of the worst food habits you get into as a parent is that you start, you kind of finish your child's dinner. And it's usually, I hate to say it, but kind of kids and processed food. And that might be grabbing some chocolate, grabbing a cookie with a cup of tea, et cetera. And I've been telling myself that question or asking myself that question, will I feel ashamed after eating this? And 80% of the time it forces me to put the food back down. And if I actually look at my whole foods percentage for June so far, I'm already at like, I know we're only, what, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6 full days, but I've eaten over 80% for out of those 6. So I'm already 66% and I feel very comfortable actually today and being able to hit Whole Foods and even the ones where I've missed my Whole Foods have still been pretty close. So That's really the goal for me. Keep my 6 habits over green. And then for the whole foods habit, ask myself that question, really reflect on the fact that if the whole foods habit is really going to be the key thing that's going to keep me feeling and looking how I want to look, and I have to nail that habit if I'm going to move towards my goal of looking and feeling how I want to feel. All right, cool. I'll probably drag that one out a little bit too much. Hey, that's, that's part of the I guess the negative of just kind of being natural about it and less tightly scripted. I'm feeling really good for June. I feel like I'm going to get 6 habits in the green and I feel like my whole, my whole foods habit is going to be over 60%. You never know. I might be able to get it to 70% with the way that I'm now thinking about it. We shall see. Cool. I will see you next month and I appreciate your patience as I have talked and been a little less scripted in this episode. And if you've had to look at me, I apologize, but I would love your feedback on how this sounds and also how it looks, because that's going to help me as well as reflecting back and listening to it and watching it myself. It's going to enable me to get better. And what I'm hoping to do in the second half of this year is get to the point where I'm able to produce video podcast episodes and for them just to feel I'm gonna sound really, really natural. Cool. I will see you early July where I reflect on how I did in June. Thanks.
