When the Planner didn't follow the Plan

Well, getting up at 6:00 am hasn't been going so well. It's only been going at all less than half of the time. It's a real struggle.

The thing is, I don't like going to bed early - I never have. Exciting things happen after 9 pm, and I'm too young to miss them just because I want to get a good jog in in the morning. And I'm not the person who can go on 6 hrs of sleep on a regular basis, no sir. It's a rock and a hard place, seems to be. But, like a good problem solver, I'm looking at other approaches to get my day started on the right foot and schedule plenty of time in my day to accomplish the things I want to be doing. The best solution I've found? Get up later. In my case this will require getting to work later, so I'll work on that one. Stay tuned for updates on that one. In the meantime, I think I should give the 6am plan one more ol' college try. Maybe nothing exciting will happen or I'll magically learn how to happily live off of 6 hrs sleep per night. (Any insight on how to accomplish THAT is most welcome)

Also, I think I've learned here that it is better to do something, then blog about it. Might make for better reading. And I'll find some other things to blog about in between. Hey go easy on me, I'm new to this blogging thing. So for right now, I feel like I don't have much to share. I've been reading a lot.. articles, blogs, DIYs, recipes, lists, how-to's, all sorts of things. My "health kick" seems to have taken hold pretty consistently and permanently, and now I seem to be on a self-improvement kick. I don't have much to show for my learning though, so still nothing substantial to share. I've read that one of the big downfalls of smart people is that they can easily get stuck thinking, and spend so much time thinking that they spent not enough time doing. They get bogged down in the intellectual exercise of things and never get to the putting it into action part. That's part of what personal blogging is supposed to help, right? Help you organize, motivate, and put into action. So I'm determined to do, and not just think and talk about.  I'll be back, when I have something to write.

June: The Early Bird Gets the Worm

"There's no time like the present."

"Don't put off until tomorrow what you can do today."

"There is no past, no future. There is only Now."

I am a firm believer in the truth and wisdom of these sayings. That being said, procrastinating - which is exactly the opposite of living in the present - is one of my most deep-seated habits. If I were to speculate, I would probably suggest that the tendency took place in high school. I still had the structure of a ready-made schedule, for the most part, but was introduced to long-term projects with a far-off due date and lots of flexibility in which to accomplish said project. Patience is not my strongest suit - I deal much better with the here and now (ironic, I know). And, as it happens, I perform very well under pressure. In fact, some of my best work I do under pressure. So when it comes crunch time, I'm happy to rise to the challenge. None of these things is very conducive to a steady, responsible, low-pressure method of accomplishing tasks in a timely manner. If it can be done later and there's something else to do now, why not put it off? Just one of the MANY bad habits I learned in school.

Fast forward to adulthood with even more flexibility and even less accountability, and here we are. I will procrastinate on literally everything possible if left to my own devices - beginning with the very first thing, getting out of bed in the morning! And it's all downhill from there. You get out of bed late. You're rushed to get ready. You don't have time to look overly presentable because, sleep. You don't take the time to make breakfast, so you grab something on the go, or swing by a drive-thru. You probably eat in the car. You may or may not spill food/drink on your clothes. You arrive at work, probably late, because you barely had enough time to get ready and probably left the house late, and then encountered traffic, etc. etc., so your start to the day is half a step behind, and the rest of your busy day is spent catching up. By the time you get home, you're tired from rushing all day, and you probably don't feel like cooking or cleaning or doing the chores that you didn't make time for in the morning, and none of it was made easier for you by planning and prepping ahead of time, because procrastinators don't plan and prep. You probably eat some leftovers, or whip up something quick and easy, or just say screw it and go buy something to eat. Something cheap, most likely, because although you're destined to be a millionaire, you're not made of money yet. And then you watch some Netflix because after such a long day, you deserve to relax and not think about anything. You go to bed late, because you're so good at procrastinating you even put off sleep. And you know it will just make the next step - getting up in the morning - that much harder, just like every other but of procrastinating that you do, but you do it anyway. And then the cycle begins again.

You've just read the Reader's Digest version of A Day In the Life of a Hot Mess. And that could be a blog in and of itself! But I don't want to be a Hot Mess anymore. I want to Get My Shit Together. And that is why June's habit it getting up early and getting my day going. Here's the plan:

5:45 - Alarm goes off. Get out of bed WITHOUT HITTING SNOOZE (This is a tough one. Don't judge me.)
Drink a glass of water. Swish coconut oil while washing face, spit and brush teeth.
6:00 - Morning yoga, 15-20 minutes.
6:20 - Morning run. This will start as a walk, and progress into a run. The goal is to run 5 miles Mon-Thurs, and hill sprints on Friday. I'm starting at 2 miles. After this month I won't have to get up early on Sat-Sun, but for the purpose of habit building I will get up EVERY day, but it will be a walk instead of a run on weekends.
7:00 - Feed and water the animal, clean her litter box.
7:05 - Get cleaned up, do hair and makeup, get dressed for the day
7:30 - Make breakfast. This will require planning ahead to be able to make breakfast in just 15 minutes.
7:45 - Sit down and eat breakfast. On the patio if it's nice out, at the table if it isn't. Enjoy the first meal of the day :)
8:00 - Leave the house.

It's June 4, and I've already been slacking 3 out of 4 days, so it's time to buckle down. If I can choose juice over solid food for 21 days, I can choose to start my day over snoozing in bed. I can do it. Here we go!

May: You Are What You Eat

For the May chapter of Project Gyst, I did a 21-day Juice fast.

Now, there are a lot of ways to revamp your eating habits, get in shape, eat healthier, etc. And I know that there are mixed reactions about juicing, but bear with me.

I purposely didn't start blogging during my juice fast for a couple of reasons. First, I don't want this blog to be solely about juicing or losing weight. I did this juice fast to eliminate the bad eating habits I had developed, but that's just the start of it. The real challenge is to consistently feed my body solely good things long-term.

Second, there are already plenty of blogs that I would point you to for a narrative of that experience. If you're interested in or curious about juicing, I recommend reading:

• http://healthyhaley60.blogspot.com/
• www.rebootwithjoe.com/‎
• http://juicing-for-health.com/
• http://www.rawgeneration.com/products/skinny-cleanse-1-day?variant=269807012

Rebootwithjoe.com and juicing-for-health.com are both great websites with lots of information about juicing, raw fruits & vegetables cleansing, and lots of other health-related topics. And healthyhaley60 is my good friend Haley's blog about her own juicing experience and personal health journey, which is the biggest thing that motivated me to finally do my own juice fast. And Raw Generation has great cleanse juice recipes. I highly recommend making your own juices, though. Buying them from a good company like Raw Generation, you'll easily spend $60 for ONE DAY of juices. I sent half of that in produce for the same recipes, and it lasted me a week.

All that being said, this 21-day juice fast was the first step of my on-going Project Gyst, so I do want to share about the experience and my results.

The fast: I drank 3-5 fresh juices/smoothies a day. I started out making smoothies in my Nutribullet, but after the first 5 days I started straining out the majority of the pulp. Juice tastes better. I also drank a gallon of water each day. I may not have made it to quite a gallon on some days, but that was the goal and most of the time I hit it. I drank herbal tea, mostly green tea. Finally -- and this is not official-juice-fast-approved -- I had a plant-based protein shake with coconut/almond milk each day and a pickle or two for potassium. Because I work out 5 days a week, I wanted to be careful that I was getting enough protein and potassium to keep up with the workouts.

The Experience: The first few days I felt hungry, tired, a little fuzzy in the afternoons, and crabby. After the initial adjustment to juices rather than solids and few calories and more nutrients, I started to feel great! Still some crabby mood dips, which is to be expected (you can read about healing reactions at juicing-for-health.com), but even when my mind or emotions felt grumpy, my body felt better than it has in years. I noticed that I felt better internally, that I was more in tune with my body, and was beginning to feel the difference between feeling actual hunger, feeling thirsty, and just feeling cravings after about the first week. It wasn't until well into the second week that my skin started clearing up and I noticed some fat loss. By then it was smooth sailing, and before I knew it 3 weeks had passed!

The Results: I lost 11 lbs over the course of the fast - from 137 lbs to 126 lbs. I can see more of my tone (although let's be real, I was bikini-ready before the fast. ;). My skin feel MILES better and is almost entirely clear. I will continue with a dairy-free and gluten-free diet to see how this effects my skin as well. And best of all, I don't crave junk. My eating habits and digestive system have been "reset" if you will, making it so much easier to maintain healthy habits moving forward. It's not that hard to just pass on things I've decided not to eat during the week (Sundays are free days - all things in moderation!) when I know that I've passed on literally all food (except pickles) for 21 days. Here's before and after:

Project: Get Your Shit Together

I'm Bekah.

Some months ago I took a look at my life, and I was none too impressed with what I saw. Oh, it wasn’t really my life that I wasn’t thrilled with — I have an amazing boyfriend, great family, good job, good friends, I live in a great city in a house I love, I have every opportunity available to me… I enjoy my life. What’s not to like?

But when I looked at me… I had become lazy, complacent, I had gained weight (just a little) and become loose about the junk I was eating, all the time. My skin was the worst it’s ever been, when at 24 it should be at it’s best! I had emotional mood swings more and more frequently. I would feel fine one minute, and then some tiny trigger would go off and all of a sudden I was an insecure, needy, antisocial mess of anxiety and sometimes tears. And the worst part was, I wasn’t doing anything. I had dreams and goals that I wanted to accomplish, and very little progress toward them because, honestly, I had put very little effort into them. I wanted to paint, play music, take pictures, go places, build things, write things, make a difference… and I did none of those things. I wanted to build a career, eat good foods, learn to cook, exercise regularly, get my finances together… and I did none of those things. What I did do was hang out, eat whatever seemed tasty, go out and spent my money on food and drink, and watch lots of netflix. I’m not a loser, but I was acting like a loser.

It isn’t easy for me to publicly write these things about myself. But I’ve gathered a lot of inspiration and motivation from reading blogs of other people being honest and open about themselves and their struggles and insecurities, and for that reason I decided to write about my own journey. Maybe I can be part of someone else’s personal growth journey. Maybe a sentence or two that I say somewhere along the way will catch in someone’s mind and they’ll glean something that they can use to improve their own life. And maybe it will help me along the way. They say that blogging helps you become a better writer, helps you develop an eye for meaningful things, and cause you to live a more intentional life. So why not?

Back to me. I looked at myself, didn’t like what I was doing with my life, and thought, “Bekah. Get your shit together!!” And then I made a plan. And then I procrastinated on implementing said plan, because holidays, and birthdays, and parties, and summer, and fun, and lazy, and I don’t wanna. And then, finally, I embraced the truth that there’s no time like the present, and I began. Research shows that it takes 21 days to establish a habit (or break a habit), so that’s where I‘m starting. I’ve got some bad habits to kick and some good habits to start, so here’s the project: every month I will pick a new habit. 30 days is more than 21, but we’ll just say there's an extra week is for good measure. And for that month, I will strictly follow a set of rules in order to establish that habit. It’s a bit of an experimental project, but I’m excited to see how it works. Here we go!