What I learned from my 10-day reset.

What I learned from my 10-day reset.

Recently I focused on adding three new healthy habits to my daily routine. One task per health category: movement, nutrition and emotional well-being. It was tough but sharing my plan online helped hold me accountable and motivated me to see it through. Here’s how I did!

Nutrition-No Sugar: You might not know this about me, but I can eat a plate of cookies if they are dairy and gluten free, won’t get out of the car for ice cream unless it’s at least medium-sized, love to eat (dairy free) chocolate after dinner and put a quarter cup of honey in my tea. Baking something with the kids? I always lick the spoon and bowl clean. Well, that needed to stop. My wake-up call has been stomach issues that are related to a systemic candida infection. Ever heard of that? Let’s just say it gets worse with sugar intake. Therefore, I decided to go without sugar for 10 days. I wasn’t looking at ketchup bottle labels for sugar content, but I did cut out all the things I mentioned above. I still put dates or bananas in my smoothies and did have a sugary mocktail at a birthday party but nothing else. After 10 days my stomach improved significantly, even started sleeping better, but after talking to my doctor about my candida issue I decided to cut the dates and bananas from my smoothies and prolong the no sugar plan indefinitely.

Movement- Yoga: Years ago I went to a yoga workshop at a Buddhist retreat center in Northern Colorado. We did yoga two to three times a day along with going for runs in the mountains and spending time in meditation. I felt amazing coming home but have never been able to be consistent with regular yoga, which my body needs along with regular adjustments (adjusting others all day long is hard on my own spine!). I don’t hate yoga, I just don’t love it and enjoy several other forms of exercise more. But I know it’s something I need to get back to with consistency, so I downloaded an app and got started a couple months ago. After starting and re-starting multiple times so far this year, I re-committed with this 10-day plan and completed 20-minute sessions on nine out of ten days. I easily saw benefit after the fourth or fifth day and am starting to look forward to it! If I don’t do it first thing in the morning, it usually doesn’t happen. My goal going forward is to commit to five morning sessions a week.

Emotional-Media Fast: This was probably the hardest task for me to complete as I decided to avoid all social media, news, sports blogs and television. I still used my computer for work & email and my phone for calls & text. I still posted a few times on social media but didn’t scroll my feeds or even look to see how our posts were doing. Tv’s were on at the gym and my kids watch their shows while I’m nearby but no intentional watching on my part. The first couple days were tough as I was constantly picking up my phone only to catch myself and then put it down. Or start typing in a website on the computer before stopping. The funny thing is that it only took a couple days before those habits started to break. I thought I would just check my email more but after cleaning out my inboxes, I actually started checking them less. Even went an entire day without checking them at all. And I didn’t miss a thing! Same goes for bank accounts. What did I do instead? I finished a book, I started and finished another, listened to a couple podcasts, listened to half of an audio book, played games with my kids, worked in the yard, wrote some blog posts, finished a new addition to our website, made some stretching videos AND did some work for our favorite charity. Needless to say, I probably benefited the most from this aspect of my reset and will minimize my media intake going forward.

Overall, this was a good challenge for me and hopefully some of you will try a version that suits your own personal needs. I’ll likely do it again with different goals soon and try to recruit more of you to join me. So, stay tuned!