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Healthy Habits
Eric Burkhart Health, Fitness, Food DK30 New Year 2022 1 1
Description
I’ve fallen out of good habits and into some bad ones over the last year since my son was born. I’ll use a point system to track my overall progress on multiple habit changes: Bedtime, daily runs or walks, avoiding junk food, eating earlier, being sober, and avoiding time wasting activities. Scores will be positive for good habits, zero for neutral ones, and negative for bad habits.
Recent Updates
After about two months I’m marking this as complete. I’m happy with my progress as I was able to overall reduce bad habits and re-introduce good ones. Filling in the chart every day gave me time to reflect and plan, and some setbacks like a foot injury led me to add alternate good habits to my tracking list.
Here’s the list of habits I was tracking by the end:
- Bedtime
- Weight training
- Cardio
- Stretching
- Sobriety
- Junk Food
- Vegetables
- Plenty of fluids
- Not eating late
- Time wasting sites
My family is visiting this week which has disrupted a lot of my habits. Interestingly though, it’s disrupted the bad ones more than the good and my scores have jumped.
Here’s my progress so far leading up to the first official day of DK30. I hurt my foot which is disrupting running, so I added in stretching which should have been there all along anyway!
After writing down some daily tasks and best practices that will help me succeed on my main goals, I decided to explicitly track them in the point system. My last post is updated with new #'s.
I created my daily tracking spreadsheet and the range of scores is -18 to +14. My first few days averaged to -11 so I have plenty of room to improve! I’m going to get a bit of a head start since there are 10 different habits being tracked and that’s a lot of ground to cover.
Estimated Timeframe
Feb 8th - Mar 10th
Week 1 Goal
This week I’ll focus on adjusting my bed time. I need it to be 10:30pm instead of 12am. My goal for the week is 11:30pm most nights, and 11pm on at least one night. To help make this easier:
- Set up melatonin / winding down reminder
- Adjust strength of blue light filter on phone and computer
- Daily walks or runs
- Avoid intense media or stressful work after 10pm
- Try to be sober every night
Week 2 Goal
This week I’ll focus on minimizing time wasting activities.
- Rebuild the habit of taking 10 seconds after any trigger/impulse to decide if I really want to engage with a time wasting activitiy.
- Identify and reduce triggers throughout the day.
- Don’t let time wasting activities keep me up past my target bedtime.
Week 3 Goal
This week I’ll improve my diet.
- No snacks after dinner.
- Daily fruit smoothie with spinach every morning.
- Eat a large breakfast and lunch, smaller dinner.
- Finish dinner by 6:30pm
Week 4 Goal
Assess which habits need more attention and planning. Focus on implementing ideas to set myself up for success.
