Blog

Last year, my wife, Danielle, was deep into reading “Girl, Wash Your Face” by Rachel Hollis and discovered Hollis’ “Last 90 Days” challenge. Reading about it motivated her to want to do the challenge and make a change. After some research, she asked if I wanted try the Keto diet with her. I was open to the idea and agreed to join the challenge, thus we started the Keto diet on October 1, 2018, and that was just step one in a series of habit and lifestyle changes.

In case you are reading this and thinking “why should I care about this guy’s habits and routine?” my point in this post is not really to promote my routine, but more the point of how it came about and how much better I feel since making the changes. It’s all small changes, built up over time, like compounding interest. A little here, a little there, has made an amazing difference in our lives. It started with simply changing our diet. You may think that the Keto diet was a big change, but while it was a big change health-wise, habit-wise it was really just a matter of understanding what you can and can’t eat. In our case once we found a few recipes and got a handle on the basics of the diet, it really hasn’t been that hard to stay on track.

About a week into the diet, we both got hit with what is called the Keto Flu. It hit us both hard for about 24 hours, but after that we found that we actually felt better on the diet, like a lot better. Overall body aches and pains have faded away, we both feel like we rest better and have more energy than on our old heavily carb-based diet. As far as cooking goes, we’ve enjoyed doing more experimentation with new recipes, tweaks to old recipes and learning the ‘keto’ substitutions to replace different higher carb ingredients. Once we understood the basics of the diet and what foods we could and couldn’t have, we found that you can still stick to the diet even when eating out. We found a few “go-to” meals and then from learning the Keto-friendly foods, we could pick out a meal (with some customization) at a variety of restaurants.

Once we were on track with the diet, I decided to make another habit change, I chose to finally start getting up at a consistent time every morning. My habit of sometimes getting up with my 1st alarm and many times my 6th or 7th alarm wasn’t really working.

“Hey Google, Set An Alarm”

We have a Google Home Mini in our Master Bathroom, which is just a few feet from my side of the bed. So I decided to use that as an alarm clock. I set an alarm each evening for 4:55AM. Our Google Home is tied to Spotify, so I can tell it play music as the alarm. My exact command is: “Hey Google, set an alarm for 4:55AM with Foo Fighters” I choose the Foo Fighters because, well why wouldn’t you choose the Foo Fighters?

Also, if you have your Spotify account linked to your Google Home, the current song of choice when you choose Foo Fighters, is Play, which starts off with a slow droning build before the drums hit. I’ve found that’s enough to wake me up, but not Danielle, so I can quickly get out of bed and say “Hey Google, stop alarm” before it gets loud and wakes everyone up. This is a motivation to get up quick and also a fall back in case I sleep through the intro, because once the song kicks in I’ll definitely be up.

Once the wake-up habit was established, I moved on to organizing the rest of my morning into a set routine.

Coffee, Coffee, Coffee

After I turn off my alarm, the next, and arguably most important step, is coffee. Coffee was part of my morning routine before the new alarm habit, and isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Also, part of the change for the Keto diet was to eliminate creamer and sugar from my coffee, so now I wake up with straight black coffee. My coffee of choice is Black Rifle Coffee, specifically their CAF blend for my first cup in the morning. The CAF blend is a medium roast that has double the caffeine of a typical cup of coffee.

While the coffee brews, I start getting out my supplements. I take several supplements, all of which are Young Living products. I’ll do a follow-up with an in-depth post as to what the purposes are for each of the supplements, but for now, these are the ones I take:

That “E” Word

Once I established the coffee and supplements routine for a few mornings, I started doing a brief workout. Nothing major, some sit-ups, push-ups and stretching. I did this for several weeks and then it evolved into being followed with a morning run when we bought a used treadmill.

Currently, I do my stretching, 20-30 sit-ups, 15-20 push-ups and 20-25 second side and elbow planks. My stretching is pre-run focused, so it’s mainly leg and lower-back stretches. I usually run a mile, sometimes I go to a mile and a half. My aim is to eventually run 2-3 miles a morning.

I Ran A 5k And It Felt Great

After running a mile or more each morning for around a month, we decided to participate our local annual 5k, the Heron Hustle. The 5k is to benefit children with special needs and we decided to participate with our son’s whole travel baseball team. My son and I ran together and honestly, I was straining to to keep up with him. We followed it with the mile Fun Run (which he placed 4th in) and despite a couple days of sore legs afterward, I felt great about it. I felt a huge sense of personal accomplishment from completing it, because if you’d told me 6 months earlier that’d I would have run a 5k I’d have laughed at you. Now, my son and I have run 2 in 2 months. We just recently ran the Braves Country 5k in Atlanta, GA and can honestly say we both had a blast. We’re already planning to run another around the 4th of July.

It’s Marathon Not A Sprint

Don’t be mistaken about all of this, I haven’t changed my habits and moved to this routine overnight, and I’m not an expert by any means. I started the habits slowly, adding 1 or 2 things at a time and would make sure to be consistent about them for several days or more before adding anything else. The whole process has taken form over a couple of months and I’m still adding as I go. I plan to add more strength workouts and longer runs, but as I said it becomes more of a habit for me if I integrate new items individually over a few days at a time.

Overall, my point in this post is not really the routine, more to convey that changing your habits for the better is always possible. We’ve made a change to our diet that has been amazing for us, and it just took us committing to make the change.