7 Daily Self Care Habits to Help You Lose Stubborn Weight with Dipa Chauhan-Patel

Morning everyone. Hope you're all having an amazing day so far. Happy Friday. I wanted to hop on here to talk about self love and self care. I just posted a meme in the community group and I wanted to talk a little bit more about self care and self love and some habits that you can start to implement immediately to implement more self care into your day to day life practice. So give me a second here. I'm just going to make sure that I'm live and make sure you guys can hear me and see me. If you can hear me and see me, give me. Type a yes in the, in the comments. Let me know where you're from, where you're tuning in from. Just go ahead and type yes in the chat if you can hear me and see me. Okay. Okay. See that I'm live. All right, so today we're going to be talking about self care and self love and I put together a meme of seven habits that you can start incorporating immediately to demonstrate more self love and self care throughout your day. So Christy says yes. Hi, Christy. Hope you're doing well. Christy's from Cincinnati. Hello. Hello. So number one on the list is surround yourself with plants. So you want to make sure that you surround yourself with plants that are going to really be conducive to your environment, right? So there's so many benefits to surrounding yourself with plants. They help to provide, they help to clean the air, they have been shown to reduce cortisol, which is one of our stress hormones. So, so they really help to change our mood, relieve stress, relieve anxiety. So surrounding yourself with plants is something that's so passive that you can do right away, right? Whatever room you spend the most time in, try to put one or two plants in that room, right? So in my room right now, this is my office, I have three plants in this room and they just provide me with so much joy and so much, you know, instantly when I look at them, my mood just shifts, right? I experience less anxiety, less stress if I'm in that state. So, you know, surround yourself with plants, right? Number two on the list here is learn to say no to people and projects that no longer serve you. So this is a huge one, right? Many of us, especially some of the women out there, we have a tendency to say yes to everything, right? Whatever our husband or our kids demand of us, we have a hard time saying no sometimes, right? And we have this so called people pleasing personality which has been ingrained into us from when we were younger. So, you know, as you get older, as Your kids require less of you. This is something that I've had to learn is I've had to learn to say no, right? I've had to. And I feel like it helps to serve my family better when I allow them to do certain things for themselves. So my son is now almost 11 and I have him make his breakfast by himself in the morning, right? Sometimes he'll ask me and I'll do it once in a while, but for the most part I say no and I let him do it himself. Now he's old enough that he can make his own breakfast. So that's just one example. But you really have to start to say no to things that no longer serve you. And I truly believe that you have to prioritize your self care above all else and role model that for your children, right? So if you are role modeling, putting yourself last every time, putting everyone above you, then guess what, they're going to do that when they get older too, right? And it's not about being selfish, but it's really about prioritizing our health and our self care so we can show up better for them. Number three is nourish yourself with healthy food. This is such an important one. I mean, I know many of you on the live right now can probably relate that when you eat something that you know is not really serving your health at the highest level, you probably feel like crap, right? You feel more fatigued, you feel more tired the next day. So really want to emphasize the importance of a healthy whole food diet incorporating more fruits, more vegetables, more nuts, more seeds, more whole foods into your diet and less processed food, right? So really nourish yourself with healthy foods, right? Healthy fats, all of that is going to help you feel so much better and show up so much better. More, more mental clarity, less brain fog, more energy, better sleep. So I really can't over emphasize how important it is to nourish your body with healthy food. Number four is spend 10 minutes in silence observing your breath. So this is such an important one. I try to do this every single morning. I use an app which just, I set it so that it provides me with a little less guidance. I don't like too much guided meditation, so it just kind of has a theme for the day and then the rest of it is just in silence. And what I do during those 12 minutes that I meditate, 10 to 12 minutes that I meditate, is I really focus on my breath and that allows me to become super present in the moment and allows me to really, you know, Stop the thoughts, right? So many of us, if we have a moment to just be right, we're thinking about the future or we're thinking about the past, but we're not really in the present moment. So focusing on our breath is a great tip that you can do throughout the day to really bring you back into the present moment, right? So they say that anxiety is a result of being the future and that depression is a result of pondering on the past. So focusing on our breath as much as possible is really going to allow us to be more in the present moment. And so I try to do this, as I said, every morning, or when I feel like my thoughts are racing or when I feel overwhelmed or stressed out, I come back to my breath. And this is such an important practice because it's not only going to bring you into the present moment, but it's also going to allow you to become more intuitive with your body, how you feel, and really, really, you know, help you become less reactive and more responsive, right? So it's a practice. Just like lifting weights and building muscles is a practice, you know, focusing on your breath, mindfulness, whatever you want to call it, is a practice. You know, at first, 10 minutes may feel really, really long, right? You're not, most of us are not used to sitting in silence for 10 minutes because most of us have been trained to always do, do, do, go, go, go. So as much as possible, try to train yourself. You know, you may not start out with 10 minutes, maybe you start out with two to three minutes and then build up from there, right? As you get more used to it, add another couple minutes until you get to 10 minutes. And hey, if you want to do more, do more, right? Or, or you can do it multiple times throughout the day so you can focus on your breath first thing in the morning or before bedtime. Before bedtime is a great time to do it as well because it really helps you to wind down and set yourself up for a great night's sleep. So type yes in the comments if you're already doing any of these four practices that I've just talked about. I'm going to talk about another three, but type yes in the comments if you're practicing any of these self care habits or share some that you're already doing, right? What's a self care practice or habit that you do, you know at least five to seven times a week? The next one on the list is enjoy a relaxing bath. So I like to recommend this one. Before bedtime is a great time to have A relaxing bath and unwind from the day. You can always put some lavender essential oil or some Epsom salts in your bath to help enhance it. You know, it just helps you to calm down and really helps you to decompress after a long day. So this is not something you may do every day, but at least once or twice a week, a relaxing bath is a great way to decompress and, and just really hit the pause button, hit the reset button as well. So enjoying a relaxing bath is another one. And like I said, it can really help set you up for a good night's sleep as well. So that's a great, great one. Another one is go to bed early. Okay. I can't overemphasize the importance of this one. You know, almost every client that I work with has a hard time when it comes to sleep, specifically going to bed early. And this is one of the main topics that we discuss with my clients is how do we get you to sleep better? So sleep puts you into a rest and digest parasympathetic state. And when you're in the parasympathetic state, that's when your body is going to do the most repair, healing and regeneration. So we really, really want to focus on getting good quality sleep. And one of the best ways to do that is to go to bed early. So what does that mean for me? I usually try to wind down around 9, 9:30, and I'm usually in my bed by about 10pm so from 10pm to 2am is when your body does the most healing. That's when your body's going to be releasing a lot of restorative hormones like melatonin and growth hormone. So, so you really want to maximize on that timeframe. So if you are going to bed at, let's say, midnight, then you're already missing out on 50% of that healing time. So you really, really want to make sure that you're trying to get to bed early. One of the things when it comes to getting to bed early is one to two hours before bedtime, ideally once the sun goes down. You want to make sure that you start to turn off all screens. Right. And so no TVs, no cell phones, no computers, as best as possible. Right. Yesterday, for example, I had a conference and I was on my computer till about 9:30. And in that case, you want to put a blue light filter on your computer or wear blue blocker glasses, which are going to help to filter out a lot of this blue light, which is blue. Blue light is very stimulating. And it decreases melatonin production. So avoiding blue light before bedtime is going to be super, super important. So go to bed early, right? A lot of my clients, when I speak to them, they're going to bed at midnight, 1am, 2pm so what I tell them, it's going to be hard to just shift your bedtime back to 10pm in the snap of a finger. But what I tell them is every one to two weeks to shift that bedtime back by 15 minutes until you get as close to 10pm as possible. Okay? And then the last one I wanted to cover here is look at yourself in the mirror and say I love you and accept your body and for where it is right now, right? This one is a really tough one for a lot of people. Sometimes myself included, right? Sometimes when I wake up in the morning and I look at myself in the mirror, it's very easy for us to just start criticizing and to start pointing out all our imperfections, right? But as much as you can just literally pause and look at yourself in the mirror, you know, initially it might be hard, but 10 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds, eventually one to two minutes and just really appreciate your body for everything that it does, right? You were able to wake up in the morning after that night's sleep, your body was breathing and your heart was beating without you even having to think about it. So just really appreciate the miracle of your body and all that it does for you, right? Look at yourself in the mirror. Point out one to two things that you like about yourself, right? Do you like your hair? Do you like your nose? What do you like about yourself, right? And really focus on those things versus the imperfections. Because we all have imperfections, right? So really look at yourself. At first, it might be hard to even say I love you to yourself, but eventually, as you do this as a daily practice, say I love you to yourself. Give yourself a big hug, right? We don't do all this enough, but you really want to focus on gratitude for your body and for all that it does for you. So I hope that was helpful. Those are seven life changing self love and self care habits that I highly recommend that you can implement right away. And you know, I would love for you, if you're on the live today or if you're watching the replay, share one of those that you're going to implement in your day today. Okay, so Christy says I started quiet time in the morning and slowly turning it into breathing meditation time. Beautiful. Love that. Yeah, it's all these small, simple lifestyle practices. Self care habits that just make such a huge, huge difference. One of our key philosophies and values is simplicity, just keeping things simple because they can really create such large shifts with our health and our well being. So go ahead and type one in the comments. Alice is saying that she's going to take a nice bath today. Love that. I might do that too. It's been a while actually since I took a nice relaxing bath, so maybe I'll do that one today too. Okay everyone, well I'm going to get going. Hope you enjoyed that and got some value out of it. Make sure you implement one of those habits into your day today. Bye for now. Have a great day.