What started my journey with foundational health habits?

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 this very first episode, I reflect on my journey so far with building foundational health habits into my own life. It was actually really nice to take a step back and see how it all came together, and it should also serve as a really nice introduction to what the podcast is all about. Enjoy the episode. All right, welcome to the first episode of the Daniel Clough Podcast. I thought a good way to kick things off would be for me to talk a bit about what started my journey with foundational health habits. And I want to start with a quote, firstly because it's my favorite quote, and also it just so happens to really nicely sum up my journey with health habits. And the quote is this: "Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all of the difference in my life." Now, that quote is from Steve Jobs, and it resonates really deeply with me. And that's because there was no one moment where I sat down and said, right, I need to transform my life. And to do that, I am now going to start tracking foundational health habits because I know that they are the base of the pyramid for me. I also happen to know exactly which ones to track. And once they are nailed, I will be a completely different person, somebody who is more confident, more capable, has better energy, and is in better health. And also, I would know that this would completely change my physique. Even though that would be the perfect awesome story to tell, it just didn't happen like that. I wasn't able to connect the dots looking forward in that way. I can only now connect them backwards because I've been on that journey. So I think it's best to start at the beginning. And it actually all started with me wrestling to get my relationship with alcohol under control. And I'll save the long version for another podcast, but alcohol was a huge handbrake on my life. As I got into my 40s, my hangovers were getting worse and they were getting longer, and that was really despite cutting down how much I drank. I was often left tired, anxious, and full of self-doubt. And I want to give you a couple of examples of how this played out in my life. Every Monday morning for my job, I had 2 management meetings to run., and I used to dread them. I'd feel nervous, anxious, and full of self-doubt going into them. I just felt horrible about myself, and I could literally feel my heart racing as I spoke in the meeting, actually even just anticipating that I would need to speak. And this was a really big hurdle that I had to deal with every single week. And I can remember on a Sunday evening really not looking forward to the next day. And then once those meetings were over, I just felt this huge amount of relief. The second example is: I also found it really hard to consistently stick to a training program and also to eat healthily. And I felt like I had no control over either of these. For example, I felt like I had no control as to whether I trained 4 times a week and had a great week, or whether I trained no times per week and had a bad week. And then from a food perspective, there was a huge amount of bingeing going on, just a lot of overeating, a lot of eating ultra-processed comfort foods. And overall, I just found it very, very hard to be a disciplined person. And this really ate away at me. I desperately wanted to be a disciplined person, somebody who could do what they said and could do what they wanted to do. And look, I had tried to set rules for myself with alcohol hundreds of times before, things like no more than a handful of drinks per week. No more than 2 drinks per day. Only Friday through Sunday would I have a drink, and without fail, I always eventually failed. And one day I just had enough, and I can remember that day really vividly. I'd been out the night before with some friends, and I'd had 4 or 5 drinks, and again I'd broken my rule of not having more than a couple of drinks per day, and as a result was feeling terrible the next morning. Terrible because I'd missed that, that limit. I hadn't hit that limit. And also just terrible because I'd had a few drinks the night before. And I decided at that moment that I needed to cut alcohol out of my life forever. It was just going to be the only way I could move forward properly. And I also happened to recall somebody's advice in that moment from a podcast that I'd listened to on their journey to getting sober. And they said something to the effect of, the best drink not to have is the first one. And that was a mentality I really needed to adopt. So that weekend I printed out a 30-day calendar and I stuck it to my fridge so that it would be right in front of me every single day. And I went for a don't break the chain strategy. And that's where you just— I'm just looking to build consecutive days of achieving my goal. So each day that I didn't have a drink, I would put a tick against it. And eventually, 7 days unbroken turned into 30 days unbroken, 30 days into 60 days, and the rest is history. I was just amazed at how much better I felt when I wasn't drinking. The feelings of tiredness, anxiety, self-doubt, they didn't completely go away, but I had periods where they really started to shift into the background for quite a while, and I was really starting to feel like a brand new person. And importantly, my journey with giving up alcohol at that point introduced me to a very important concept, and that is the power of tracking a habit on a daily basis and also just making sure that it was in my awareness many times throughout the day. So that was really stage 1 of my journey, now that I can look back on it, with building foundational health habits, really cutting alcohol out of my life. The next step was a few months into giving up alcohol, I realized just how important sleep was for me. When I had a few consecutive nights of poor sleep, I would get the same feelings of tiredness, self-doubt, and a lack of discipline that I got with alcohol. And that's really when a light bulb went off for me. It wasn't just the alcohol that was making me feel like this. It might have actually been more the alcohol was causing poor sleep, and together they were acting as a deadly combo. And it's actually very well proven that alcohol stops your body getting into the quality and restorative sleep it needs. So this all started to make a lot of sense. And I ended up tackling sleep in the same way that I did alcohol. I set a goal for 6.5 hours sleep, and then alongside my no alcohol tick, I also started to put a tick for achieving 6.5 hours sleep. And I don't have those tick sheets from back then, but I can remember finding it really hard to hit only 30% consistency for the first month. I mean, like, I really sucked at this. My sleep was terrible. But then the next month, this crept up to 40%, and then over the next few months, it edged into 50%. And again, all because of the daily tracking and the fact that it was in the front of my awareness every day. Now, by being so aware of it, it was pushing me to figure out ways to get better and better over time so that I could hit my sleep goal more regularly. And surprise, surprise, when I strung together a few nights of sleep over 6.5 hours, I became less tired. I became less anxious. I, I had less self-doubt. And I just found it much easier to stick to my training and to eat more healthily. And I just really felt like quite a different and more capable person. And then I had a thought, well, this worked for alcohol and it was also starting to work for sleep. So I should do this for a few more habits that would be good for me. Why not really push this as far as I can? I mean, I'm already feeling so much better and I'm starting to get more consistent with my training and my nutrition. And I'm also really liking how more— how much more disciplined I am becoming. And this led me to coming up with a bunch of other health habits that felt sensible to tackle. I bought a trusty Moleskine lined notepad and made one page my own daily tick sheet for the month. This way I could track a handful of habits each month in the same way that I did with alcohol and sleep. Fast forward to today, and January 2024 is my 25th month of tracking a set of foundational health habits. And over time, they have changed quite a bit, both the habits themselves and also the targets that I set myself. But I've now settled on 8 really strong foundational health habits, the ones which really move the needle for me. And I've also had to have several big mindset shifts over the last couple of years.. And I've had to go through a whole bunch of trial and error to figure out strategies for being able to be consistent with each of my habits. And again, this was all really hard to predict. But now that I can look back and see I was actually able to incrementally get to this point, 8 foundational health habits that I can be consistent with. And the results, as I've mentioned in this podcast so far, have been awesome. I hardly ever feel tired and anxious nowadays. In fact, most of the time I feel great and I have really good energy. Most of the self-doubt has gone and I'm a much more confident person in all areas of my work— I'm sorry, all areas of my life. My work, my relationships, how comfortable I am with myself. I mean, it sounds silly, but I really like myself now. My discipline with my training and nutrition is just off the charts. In fact, I often tell people that I live my life like an athlete or that I'm in athlete mode. And that actually kind of sounds ridiculous on the face of it, because trust me, my performance is nowhere near the level of an athlete. But my discipline and the way that I live my life would not be out of place with the discipline you would see amongst athletes. And as a result, I've been able to transform my physique. I have lost over 20 pounds and I've significantly reduced my body fat. I've gone from being able to see no abs at all to now being able to see 4 abs, and at my leanest a couple of months ago, being able to see 6 abs. Um, and then the other thing I've also been able to do is improve a bunch of health markers along the way too. Blood pressure is a very good example of something I've been able to significantly lower through better habits. So there you have it. The whole journey started with me really just generally feeling lousy about myself and lousy about my health. And the first thing I tackled was alcohol. And this obviously had a huge impact in my life. And that led me to tackling one other big one— sleep. And from there, I used these learnings to start tackling other habits. And over time, these transformed into the 8 foundational health habits that I have today. And as I said at the start, I could never have predicted this journey. I can only now connect the dots looking backwards and just be forever grateful that I stumbled into this journey. And I know hands down they are so important that I will track foundational health habits in my life forever. The change has just been too powerful and I never want to lose my grip on it. In fact, at the moment, all I really want to do is just take things to the next level. So look, if you're still here listening to this, I really appreciate it. I started this podcast to share these learnings with others and to also reflect on my own continued journey with all of this stuff I'd learned myself. And by doing that, I hope that you will find it inspiring and also useful to start your own journey of building foundational health habits into your life. Okay, thanks again for listening, and see you in the next episode.