Month: October 2020

How To Wake Up Early For Your Morning Routine

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A good morning routine will help you get your day started on the right foot. Follow these tips and you’ll be a morning person in no time.

How To Wake Up For Your Morning Routine

Why Make a Morning Routine?

Don’t you wish you could wake up each morning, ready to go and feeling rested? I’ve talked about the importance of sleep and how to get it in this post, but sleep is only part of the equation. You have to actually get out of bed the next morning.

Having a morning routine will make waking up easier, and you’ll feel more fulfilled when you complete your tasks to prep for your day. Knowing you’ve already completed a few tasks will get you going, and you can capitalize on that momentum for the rest of the day.

How To Get Up In The Morning

First things first, you have to start with sleep. I’ll say it until I’m blue in the face, but without a good night’s sleep you won’t meet your goals for the next day. Once you have the sleep part down, there’s just a few steps that will help you wake up when you want to.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and waking up consistently won’t happen overnight. Give yourself time to adjust, and be realistic about your goals.

Follow these steps and you’ll get there soon enough, just be patient.

Set Your Intentions The Night Before

This sounds cheesy, but I have found it to be immensely helpful for waking up in the morning. Set your intention the night before. Your mind is a powerful tool. That might sound a bit woo woo, but it’s true!

Have you ever had to wake up for an early flight? You know that if you don’t get up by X time, you’ll be running late and possibly miss your flight. Going to bed, you run over everything you’ve packed, what time you need to leave your house, etc. Then the next morning you spring out of bed right on time. It’s strange how that works!

Most of the time that scenario is driven by anxiety, but I promise you can harness the same process for your daily routine. Even if you don’t believe me, just give it a shot.

Tonight, as you’re lying in bed, close your eyes, and say, “Tomorrow I’m going to wake up at 6:00 am, when my alarm goes off, I’m going to feel rested, and I’m going to get out of bed and get going.” You’ll be surprised at how well it works.

Set your intentions and your mind will follow through in the morning.

Don’t Snooze Your Alarm

This one is tough to get used to at first: Don’t snooze your alarm. You do not get any meaningful sleep in the 9 minutes between your alarm and snoozing. You might think you do, but you really don’t. Tell yourself that it’s time to get up, and do it.

The key here is actually getting out of bed. If you decide not to snooze, but you lay in bed and think “5 more minutes”, you’ll quickly go back to sleep. Now you don’t have any alarm, so you’ll oversleep and be late to work.

How To Set Your Alarm

Now that you can’t snooze, it’s important to set your alarm the right way. You might be thinking “I just pick a time on my phone, right? How complicated is that?” It’s not complicated, but it does require a bit more thought.

Pick your time thoughtfully.

When you’re wanting to start a new morning routine it can be tempting to go all out and try to get up at 5 am. Sorry to burst your bubble, but if you typically wake up at 7 am, 5 am isn’t going to happen.

Pick a time that’s realistic for you, but still pushing yourself a bit. Let’s say you do get up at 7 am but you want more time in the morning. Try 6:45 am for the first couple of days, then when that gets easy try 6:30 am. Keep gradually waking up earlier, and soon enough you’ll be waking up at 5 am like you want.

Make sure you’re going to bed with enough time to get your sleep in. Waking up earlier is going to be incredibly difficult if you didn’t go to bed at a good time. I made this post that explains why you need sleep and how to get it.

You’ve picked your time, now pick your alarm.

I like to wake up to music, and in particular I like something that starts with a bang. I Love It by Icona Pop was my go-to wakeup song for a long time. It starts LOUD and has a great energy to it.

If you don’t like waking up to music, you can always pick a preset from your phone. I would advise going with something louder rather than soft. I don’t know about you, but windchimes won’t wake me up in the morning.

There’s also a multitude of apps that you can use to wake yourself up. Some make you do puzzles or math problems before dismissing them. This would be a good option if you know you’re just going to dismiss it and roll over.

There’s also the good ole standby, an alarm clock. Some people prefer setting their alarm clock (or phone) across the room from where they sleep. That way they have to get up to turn it off.

Try a few different methods and find what works for you.

Get Out of Bed

Next step: get out of bed. Seems easy enough, but this is the hardest step of them all. When you feel snug as a bug in a rug, sleepy, and warm, you don’t want to get out of bed! Cue Veruca Salt stomping her foot.

Well you have to. This goes back to setting your intentions, but once that alarm goes off you’ve got to will yourself to get up.

There’s not a lot I can say on this one, because it’s all up to you. It’s straight willpower and determination. Picture Shia LeBeouf yelling “JUST DO IT” at you. Then do it, of course.

Pick Your Habits, Start Small

So now you’re up. You may not be happy about it, but you’re up. What’s next?

This part is up to you to decide. Why did you want to get up early in the first place? What habits are you wanting to form?

I would suggest picking 2-5 habits you want to do every day (or almost every day). Start small. Don’t have a whole checklist of 20 items you must do before you eat breakfast.

My routine looks like this:

  • Bathroom time (Wash my face, brush my teeth, etc.)
  • Quick stretch session
  • Get dressed
  • Take my meds
  • Make my coffee
  • Write in my planner

Pretty simple right? It’s what I’ve found works for me on an every day basis. I’m prepared for my day, and ready to get to it. After all that it’s time for me to wake up my kids, then the day really begins.

Some other ideas for your routine might include:

  • Exercising
  • Meditating
  • Doing a daily devotional
  • Journaling
  • Clearing your inbox

You probably have several of your own that you’re wanting to try, so start there and move forward.

A cup of coffee is a great way to start your morning routine.

Be Prepared For Your Morning Routine

If you’re planning on exercising in the morning, it’s important to put everything you need out the night before. This means having your shoes ready to go, your TV set up for the exercise video, or whatever else you might need.

Same with meditation or a devotional. Put whatever you’ll use out where you can easily get started without a lot of setup at the last minute.

Get Going

As a final note, make sure you aren’t putting too many items in your routine. Especially in the beginning. Start with one or two new ones, and go from there. As you wake up earlier, you’ll have more time, and therefore be able to do more of what you want.

Now you have several tips to help you wake up for your morning routine. It can be hard to start at first, and you’ll probably have to play around with what works for you, but it’ll be rewarding once you get the habit down.

How To Wake Up For Your Morning Routine

Weighing Daily, What You Need To Know

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When people start a weight loss journey, the first question that comes to mind is: how often should I weigh myself? The answer is: it depends. No one method will work for everybody, so it might take some trial and error to figure out what’s best for you. Here’s what you need to know if you want to start weighing daily.

Weighing Daily, What You Need To Know

What’s the Right Way?

Everyone has a conflicting opinion. If you google it right now, you’ll find 15 articles with 15 different answers. There are a few schools of thought, though.

You can weigh:

Sporadically

Monthly

Weekly

Daily

Some people like setting a routine, so weighing sporadically isn’t for them. Other’s find weighing on a set schedule is restrictive and tedious. You might find that weighing daily stresses you out, but monthly doesn’t give you enough feedback.

Fluctuations and Accurate Results

Before picking how often you weigh, it’s important to talk about fluctuations. Fluctuations are small shifts in weight that are caused for a number of reasons. Most of the time they are within half a pound to a pound, but your weight can fluctuate up to 5 or 6 pounds in a day!

Some causes are: how much you eat, if you’re retaining water, where you are in your monthly cycle, how much you’ve exercised, or even if you’ve gone to the bathroom or not. The list goes on and on.

It can be discouraging to step on the scale and see a huge difference in the wrong direction, so it’s important to weigh at the same time of day. Most people (myself included) prefer to weigh in first thing in the morning, after going to the bathroom, and only in my birthday suit.

This method ensures the most accurate numbers. Some clothing is heavier than others (think of how heavy your jeans are), so fully nude (or just undies) is best. Going to the bathroom before you weigh in means your bladder is empty and you’re your lightest.

It’s also a good idea to invest in one scale to always use, as each scale can be calibrated differently. This can cause slight shifts and less accurate numbers. I use the FitTrack scale. It’s a little pricey, but I enjoy the Bluetooth syncing and the interface of the app.

How Often?

Okay, we’ve covered how to weigh in and fluctuations, so how often should you step on the scale? I said it before, but I like weighing daily.

If you only track your weight once a month, you might be retaining water on that one day. Same deal with weekly tracking. If your weight can fluctuate 5 to 6 pounds in a day, you never know what that one particular day holds for you.

Weighing daily gives you a good look at where you are every day. During my weight loss journey, I’ve found that weighing daily helps me be accountable and keeps me in check. If I’m updated each morning where I am now, I know how strict I have to be throughout the day.

When I go up a bit, I can run down my mental list of what I can do better on. Did I drink enough water? Maybe it was that cookie I ate? I also know if I stick to my good habits throughout the day, I can reverse that small gain.

The Downfalls of Daily Weighing

Stepping on the scale daily does have a few downfalls. The biggest one for me is the variability of each day. I go up some, drop down some, then I’m back up. It’s discouraging when you’ve done everything “right”, but you gain half a pound anyways!

It can also be stressful to know you have to face the numbers after a big night of eating. Every day is not going to be perfect, but nobody likes to see a gain.

Even if you just maintain your weight, it can be a bummer because you tried so hard and now you’ve got nothing to show for it. It’s nerve wracking!

A Solution

It doesn’t have to be frustrating, though. You just have to relax and stay calm.

Each day is a microscopic look at the big picture of your journey. The best way to get the full effect is to look at the trend line of your weight loss. What’s a trend line? For this example, a trend line is a line you put on a graph that shows the general direction of where the numbers are going.

When you put a trend line on a graph you can see an overall pattern. If you go up in weight for two days, down for 3 days, up one day, down two days, etc.; at the end of the cycle you’ll be down. It might not look like you’re losing weight, but over the whole week you’ve lost 1 pound.

Outside of daily fluctuations, there’s going to be days you gain. There will probably even be weeks you gain. That’s okay! It’s a process. Watching the trend line can remind you of where you started, and let you get back on track to where you want to go.

Happy Scale screen shot of my weights in September

If you look at my graph here, it shows my weight for the month of September. The dots represent the daily weight entries, and the line is the trend line of all of them. There are definitely some big spikes on there, but big drops as well. The trend line balances these spikes and drops to show the overall loss.

How to Find a Trend Line

There are a few ways to go about finding your trend line when you’re tracking daily. A lot of apps will calculate it for you when you input your weight. I use Happy Scale on IoS, but you’re just looking for an app that averages out the daily weights for you.

The Hacker’s Diet Online is a great option if you don’t want an app. The book linked on that page is also a great resource for a no nonsense look at diets. They also explain how you can chart your weights in excel or on paper, if that’s more your speed.

Is Weighing Daily Right For You?

Still though, weighing daily isn’t for everyone. Mentally it can be a lot to take on. If you’re the type of person that’s going to obsess over every small number or gain, you’ll probably want to avoid daily weighing.

A lot of people struggle with all or nothing thinking (I definitely do in some areas), and that can be a recipe for disaster when it’s mixed with a scale. Stepping on the scale and seeing a gain could lead you to just giving up on your diet, because “I might as well eat what I want if I’m going to gain”.

Seeing a plateau for a few days could cause you to think, “It’s not working so why am I even doing this”. When you make the decision to track your weight every day, you’ve got to get rid of the idea that each number matters.

You can’t give up just because it might appear it’s not working. The daily number is a very tiny part of the big picture. Definitely be honest with yourself, and watch yourself along the way.

There’s no right or wrong way to document your weight loss journey. You have to do what works for you, and that might not include daily weighing.

As a closing note I just want to give you one piece of advice: Never say you “only” lost x amount of weight. “Only” only applies to gaining, not losing or maintaining.

Weighing Daily, What You Need To Know

Friday Inspiration

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Wrapping up on Friday is a good time to reflect back on your week. Here’s some quotes to add some inspiration your next week.

You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending. – C.S. Lewis

Sometimes we regret not starting sooner, but you just need to remember you have more time to make better choices.

Fall in love with taking care of your body.

You have to start loving yourself. Your body is worthy of love no matter where you are in your journey.

Don’t let yesterday take up too much of today. – Will Rogers

It’s easy to beat yourself up over a bad day (or a few bad days). Have grace with yourself and move forward today.

There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure. – Paulo Coelho

Fear of failure is my biggest struggle in life. Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith and ignore your fears.

The secret of getting ahead is getting started. – Mark Twain

Take that first step, then another, and another. You won’t get anywhere from sitting back and waiting for your life to change.

Sometimes people around you won’t understand your journey. They don’t need to, it’s not for them. – Joubert Botha

You don’t owe anyone anything. You might encounter naysayers on your journey, but just ignore them and you’ll get to where you need to be.

Respect your body. It’s the only one you get.

We have to take care of what we have. Respecting yourself will help you to achieve your goals.