HUGE foundational health habit update!
In this solo episode, the creator reviews three months (August, September, October) of performance across his seven foundational health habits: no alcohol, 6.5 h sleep, 175 g protein, ≤2 caffeinated drinks before midday, 3 L water, 10 k steps, and whole‑food percentage. He explains that August is a holiday month, so he focused only on water and sleep, achieving 87 % water and 81 % sleep compliance. For September and October he tracked all habits, reporting: alcohol 100 % both months; sleep 87 %/84 % (average >7 h); protein 80 %/87 %; caffeine 80 %/81 %; water 90 %/90 %; steps 73 %/81 % (identified as a vulnerability); whole foods 53 %/48 % (stuck around 50 %). He analyses each habit, noting where habits are solid, where vulnerabilities exist, and why. He outlines three November focus areas: (1) increase sleep target from 6.5 h to 7 h while maintaining ≥80 % compliance; (2) eliminate the steps vulnerability by front‑loading walking in the morning; (3) raise whole‑food intake to 60 % by cleaning up Friday‑Sunday meals. He acknowledges possible challenges but remains optimistic, promising a December follow‑up.
Chapters
All right. Today's episode is a huge health habit update. I haven't done one of these since July, so we've got 3 months to cover August, September, and October. And as well as covering those 3 months, I'm also going to make a change to one of my health habits and I'm going to increase what I'm expecting of myself for November and beyond. And we'll cover that at the end of the episode. But before we jump into August, September, and October, I just want to remind you what my current goals are with my 7 foundational health habits. So 6 of my health habits I am in an incredible place with. They feel second nature and I expect 80% consistency or above every single month. And those 6 habits are no alcohol, sleep for 6.5 hours per day, eat 175 grams of protein per day, no more than 2 caffeinated drinks per day and always before midday, drinking 3 liters of water and walking 10,000 steps. Those are the habits that I expect 80% consistency and above every single month. The 7th health habit is a different story. I'm still in the early to mid stages of building it, and that's to have my whole foods to be at 80% per day. And I'm at about 50% and have been for quite a long while there. And I'm a little bit stuck if I'm honest about it. My goal is to get into 60% for that habit to kind of push myself forward. And then obviously eventually I want it to be 80%. But right now the goal is to try and work out why I'm stuck at 50% and to get into 60%. So that's the 7th habit. And again, like I said, early to mid stages of building it is perfectly fine, but I do need to figure out strategies to sort of get myself unstuck from being around that 50% mark. And of course, my ultimate goal with all of my habits, each of the 7, is to get them to 80% and be incredibly comfortable and second nature. That's the ultimate goal. So let's talk about August, September, and October. And I think the best way to talk about them is to take August separately because it was an odd month. And then we'll cover September and October for each of the 7 habits. So August is an odd month because it's school holidays. There's usually a big summer holiday in the month. There's usually a lot of traveling, a couple of other overnight stays, and in general, just the environment and my routines are incredibly hard to keep up during that month. So what I usually do in August is I pick a couple of habits to focus on that I track and hold myself accountable to over 80% for, but then I let the rest go. And the reality is, is that even if I don't track the others and even if I don't have an expectation for the others, they will probably mostly be above 80% anyway. You know, they probably won't fall below 70% just because they do get focused every single month. But importantly, because August is a strange month, it wouldn't be sensible to hold myself accountable to the same standards as the other month. So I tend to just pick a couple that really count and focus in on those. And just, you know, the aim is keep my head above water for just those and get through August. So for the month of August, there are 3 that I focused on. Of course, no alcohol. That wants to be 100%. I'm sober, so that's an obvious one. But the 2 habits that I really focused in on was drinking 3 liters of water and sleeping over 6.5 hours, because I know that if I keep myself hydrated and well-slept, that's really going to kind of be like a very, very good baseline for what is quite a challenging month. And August went really well. Drinking 3 liters of water was at 87%. And sleep for 6.5 hours per day was at 81%. Not bad for a 10-night summer holiday, a couple of other overnight trips, and basically just a lot of other unfamiliar stuff happening in that month. So August was perfectly fine and I'm super happy with it. Now we cover September and October where things went back to normal again, tracking all of the 7 habits and holding myself back accountable to 80% for 6 of them. And to try to kind of break out the 50% for that 7th one, Whole Foods. So don't need to spend any time on no alcohol. Of course, it was 100% in September and 100% in October. Always will be. But like I say in every single update, I like to keep it on there just to see it ticked off. And it is an incredibly important foundational health habit. So I will always kind of keep it on there. The next one is sleep. So sleeping over 6.5 hours per day, and I've made a lot of progress on sleep recently. Sleep is one of two habits that I felt were in a really good place, and I expect over 80% of myself for them, and they're almost second nature. But sleep and one other habit, which is actually steps, there's just a little bit of vulnerability there. I often find I often cruise in just above 80%, and sometimes it's a bit touch and go as to whether I got to 80%, but I usually do. Sleep, I seem to have broken out of that, which is great news. September was 87% and October was 84%. And I'm just finding it easy now to be well above the 80% line for sleep. And I think I've got rid of that vulnerability. I've just got into a better habit of going to bed earlier. I've got into a better habit of allowing myself some extra time in the morning if perhaps I didn't go to bed as early as what I wanted. And actually, my average sleep for September and October was above 7. I think it was like 7 hours and 20 minutes as an average. So for the most part, I feel like sleep has broken out from being a little bit vulnerable and it's just in a super solid place alongside habits like alcohol, protein, caffeine, and water. It's just always going to be over 80% now. I don't struggle with it at all. And that's great because I've said this on many episodes, that sleep is arguably the most important foundational health habit for me.. So to see that comfortably over 80% and, you know, losing that vulnerability, that's great news. So sleep, great for September and October in the green. Protein, 175 grams, again in the green both months, 80% and 87% for September and October. I find protein incredibly easy to stick to. To eat over 175 grams is fairly easy for me. My average for the week is usually over 200. Um, and usually when I struggle for protein is when I've got too many kind of like day trips or weird things going on where I'm just a bit out of my normal routine and, you know, my meals will look slightly different, etc. So, um, but yeah, 80% and 87% is just fine by me, in the green for both the months of September and October. So that's brilliant. Caffeine, 80% and 81%. Super easy. Caffeine is always gonna be just about on the mark because what I actually strategically do is pick the 5 or 6 misses that I can afford to have and I take them throughout the month. And that's usually to help compensate for an afternoon workout that I'm doing that I kind of want an extra buzz beforehand for. Maybe I'm on a day trip and I want to treat myself to a double espresso in the afternoon. So I usually pick my 5 or 6 misses there and strategically try and hit about just 80%., but not too many misses to go below 80%. So 80%, 81% in the green for both of the months is exactly where I'd expect caffeine to be. And super happy with that. Water is an easy one. I find water incredibly easy to drink 3 liters of water per day. Now, September and October was 90% and 90%. So again, that reflects just how easy I find it. You know, the, the last bit of vulnerability for water, which I've been making quite a lot of progress on recently actually is to not save it for the end of the day. What I don't want to do is find myself mid-afternoon and have drunk under a liter of water because then I'm trying to squeeze the last couple of liters in towards the late afternoon and evening. And then I struggle with kind of getting up in the night and going to the toilet, et cetera. But actually, for the most part, I'm usually pretty good now of having a couple of liters of water before midday, and then the last liter is done in the afternoon, and then I don't have much in the evening. 90% and 90% just again reflects how easy drinking 3 liters of water per day is for me now. Steps. This is the other habit that, you know, again, I expect 80% consistency from myself, but there's some vulnerability with it. And you will see that 73% in September and 81% in October really highlights that vulnerability. I fell below the mark in September at 73%. And the big thing for me for steps is If I get a decent amount of steps in fairly early in the morning, I will tend to find that through a couple of other walks or just moving about my day, I will comfortably get 10,000 steps. It's when I am sedentary or hardly get any steps as I get into the afternoon, that's when the trouble comes because it's usually then a massive effort to try and get the 10,000 steps in, in the afternoon and evening. And, you know, a decent amount at a time, that won't happen. So for me to kind of remove that kind of piece of vulnerability with my steps habit, I've got to really, really focus on getting those steps in in the morning. And Jesus Christ, it's like 1:00 already today and I think I've done about 500 steps. I find myself in exactly that situation today. So I'll be going for a walk after this. I've got an evening of quite a lot of walking, so I think I'll probably escape it. But it just goes to show that that's still a vulnerability for me. So 73%, 81%, it's there or thereabouts, but I've got to move steps from being just always a bit hit and miss and a bit touch and go whether I get to 80% to where sleep now is, for example, where I'm comfortably hitting that 85% mark and it really truly is a safe habit. So a little bit of work to do for steps for the rest of the year, but generally not in a bad place at 73% and 81%. Eating 80% of my foods to be whole foods is a massive struggle and it's something that I need to do a little bit of thinking about. So my consistency for September was 53% and October was 48%. So I felt just below the 50% mark for October. But generally speaking, I'm stuck at that 50% mark. I hovered around the 40-ish, mid-40s, for kind of 3 or 4 months as I was starting to build this habit. And then for the last 3 or 4 months, I've been kind of middling really around the 50% mark. And if I'm honest about it, I haven't been able to find a strategy to break out of the 50% so I can get into 60% and then obviously get towards my end goal at 80%. So that's really the big thing that I need to think about. And I know the one thing that I need to do to do that, and that's to clean up my eating on a Friday, Saturday, and Sunday because most of my misses are Thursday. Actually, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. That's where most of my misses come. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday is usually really clean. Thursday is there or thereabouts. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday starts to slip. And, you know, that usually nets out at about 50% for the month. Actually, if I look at my Whole Foods over the course of any given week as a total, it's usually above 70%. But the problem is, is that Monday to Thursday is fairly clean, and then Friday to Sunday is where most of that 30% is dropped. But then as a result, you know, if I'm skipping Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday and I'm not hitting my 80% those days, you can see how it kind of just always middles around 50%. So I know if I can clean up that Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, I'll be able to break into the 60%, and then I'll be able to figure out the strategies to get to the 70s and the 80s. So That's my big focus for Whole Foods. Not too bad at 53% for September, 48% for October, but still stuck around the 50%. And by cleaning up the weekend, I think it's going to help me get into the 60%. So that's the focus for Whole Foods. So as I wrap everything up, to be fair, September and October were two really good months. If we put Whole Foods aside for a minute, every single habit was in the green and above 80% other than one habit for one month, and that was 10K steps, and that was 78%, 73% in September. So, you know, there or thereabouts. So for the most part, it was a solid set of greens for the 6 habits that I consider to be safe and expect to be in the green. So that's super good. And then whole foods, you know, again, middling at 50% is not You know, it's not disastrous, it's just a bit stuck. And it's for me to figure out the strategy to get to the next level. So for the most part, I feel really good around where my 7 foundational health habits are. So what are the focuses for me? So the big focuses are really, as I've said already on this episode, it's to get that little bit of vulnerability out of my steps and to really focus on getting more steps early on in the day and to try and get that more comfortably into the mid-80s and to feel like as solid sleep, as protein, as caffeine, as water, as alcohol. And I think that that's achievable between now and the end of the year if I put a bit of extra attention on it. The other focus is to try and break out of the 50% and into the 60% for whole foods. And again, that's going to be done through cleaning up my diet, mostly for Thursdays, but absolutely for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. And I think if I can make some improvements towards a lot of part of the week in terms of how clean my eating is, I'll be able to jump into the 60% for whole foods. And then it's about how to strategize to get into 70s and 80s, but one step at a time. And then there is one more focus, and that takes me back to what I said at the beginning of the episode, is I'm going to increase what I expect of myself for one of my habits, and that is sleep. So I said I've got rid of the vulnerability for sleep. I hit 87% and 84% for sleep in September and October. And if I actually look, I'm I'll do this now with my spreadsheet. I've been in the green for sleep for all of this year. Oh, other than one month where it just fell below at 74%. But for the most part, it's a habit that I've just constantly been in the green for. So sleep, like I said, it's my most important foundational health habit. And 6.5 hours is always what I've tracked. Since I started tracking habits 6 years ago. So 3 years ago. And for the most part, it's taken me the best part of 3 years to get to the point where 6.5 hours is comfortable, second nature, and almost always over 80%. So I feel like it's in a safe enough space now to increase my expectations a little bit for sleep. And really, I think 7 hours is what I really need to kind of choose as the next level to try and hit for sleep. So I'm going to increase my sleep from 6.5 hours to 7 hours. We'll see what happens in November and December. I think with a little bit of extra attention and focus on sleep, I should be able to stay in the 80%. But it's also not unreasonable to expect that I will have to find myself pushed down to the 70%. And then I will have to figure out the odd tip or hack or strategy to kind of more safely always be in 7 hours. My average over the months is always over 7 hours. The trick is I can't— I don't think I'm going to be able to reliably hit 80% of the days over 7, but we shall see. But it feels the right time to take sleep to the next level and expect 7 hours a night of myself. And ideally, I think 8 is the absolute gold standard. Might never be achievable for me. I think 7.5 hours is probably the gold standard where I will eventually get to that is achievable for me. But certainly I've now got to take myself from 6.5 hours to 7 hours as the next big step for my foundational health habits. So we will see what happens in November. To summarize, it's take sleep to 7 hours and really focus on trying to keep that above 80%. But, you know, even if it hits 70, kind of stabilize it and try and move it forward. A little bit of extra effort for the steps to remove that vulnerability and to really get that whole foods by improving my eating on Fridays and Saturdays and Sundays into 60%. And that's my focus for November. And I will see you in December where we cover that. So thanks for listening and see you soon.
