A Case for Morning Routines

Have a better tomorrow by learning about morning routines then building and implementing your own! (Video version available here in our Go with your Gut free Facebook group).

Benefits of a Morning Routine

1. With a set morning routine, you’re on auto-pilot and the morning flows fairly seamlessly. The alternative is jumping all over the place as you feed the dog, get dressed, check your voicemail, and look for your keys.

2. Peace is a result of a well-planned morning routine; instead of feeling scattered and stressed, you can enjoy your cup of coffee or tea and know that you are ready for the day.

3. Feeling organized about your day – you can see your appointments and activities laid out, and you have a plan to achieve your most important goals, even building in self-care!

Life before a AM Routine

We’re speaking for ourselves here, but you can likely relate.

1. Inconsistent wake (and sleep) times. Sometimes we’d wake at 6am, or 8:45am or 11am…this left us feeling discombobulated and stressed as we struggled to fit in all our appointments and to-do tasks. Even worse, we’d work into the night and then create a self-perpetuating problem of inconsistent waking times.

2. Adrenaline rushes. Running around grabbing work materials, finding the outfit we planned on wearing was in the laundry hamper and having to figure out an alternative, looking for keys or an umbrella…and then hoping and praying traffic to get to meetings on time. Mornings were full of stress and anxiety.

3. Forgetting water and/or lunch. This lead to us either skipping lunch or buying a $13-20 lunch when we had perfectly good food at home. What typically followed was both food waste and money waste (from lost groceries and eating out).

This way of living cost us time, peace, and money. Something needed to change. Tired of the results we were getting, we decided, “No more of this chaos, we’re getting organized with our mornings.”

Our First Attempts at a Morning Routine

We’ve read all these articles about successful people who wake up at 4am or 5am, so we decided to enlist willpower and sign ourselves up for a 6am boxing class (during the snowy/icy winter season). Spoiler alert: it didn’t work. Why? For one, it didn’t work with our life and sleep schedule. We don’t go to bed at 8pm or 9pm typically and so we were always tired in the mornings. For two, we like food; the problem was fueling ourselves around this class. If we skipped breakfast, we’d typically feel faint during the 1-hour high-intensity workout. If we ate even a small snack 15-30 minutes ahead of time, we felt nauseous.

Reading about the great achievers, such as Richard Branson and Tony Robbins, showed me that some of these morning routines were 2-3 hours long. That was never going to work with our lifestyle so we had to create our own flexible 30 minute AM routine with exercise included. We’ve changed it throughout the years and kept it flexible to support where we are in life. Here’s what it looks like now (we’re big fans of alliteration, as you’ll see):

1. Wash and water – we brush our teeth first thing and then drink 1 cup of water before jumping into exercise…

2. Strength-training and skincare – we’ll play a very short podcast and bust out squats, full push-ups, ab work, bridges, ‘superhumaning’ (laying on the belly and lifting arms and legs), and pull-ups. All done in about 6 minutes! Then we’ll typically wash our face and body and get dressed.

3. Bunnies (pets) and breakfast – we have two (unbonded) bunnies and we’ll let one out as we prep our coffee or tea and breakfast. About halfway through, we switch them out. Typically we’ll also do our ‘mental/spiritual gym’ exercises. For your purposes, insert dog/cat/kid(s) where we have bunnies listed.

4. Launch into life – we go into the office and check the day’s calendar and our most important goals; we set alarms and put the phone on airplane mode (as needed); we’ll also take breaks to do household activities (e.g. laundry) during the day

This is not a *perfect* morning routine. Use this for inspiration to create your own routine. Now that we’ve created a customized morning routine, the only regret we have is not starting earlier in life. High school, college, and post-college could have been SO much easier and not filled with stress and anxiety. Peace is a gift we can give ourselves with a simple morning routine. The key is to make it work for YOU!

So what do you think? Do you already have a morning routine? Is there a way to improve your mornings by putting them on auto-pilot?

Fit in Fitness: 4 Tips

Source: Pexels.com

To sing-quote the 80’s band, Europe, “it’s the final count-down!”….

….of 2019. During this last quarter before the new year begins, how many of us are still on a roll with our weight, diet, and fitness goals?

If increasing physical activity has been part of your plans, here are a few tips on how to squeeze exercise into our ever-increasingly busy lives.

1. 1. 1. Schedule it! A favorite saying shared with our clients is this “if you don’t plan, plan to fail.” Whether it’s menu-planning, arranging for proper sleep, or getting your exercise in, it is unlikely to get done unless you look at your weekly plan and then create physical activity time-blocks and protect them like gold.
      2. Work out at home. Yes, it can be such a brilliantly simple solution and yet we often choose to believe that we need 2 hours (we don’t have) to allow time to get to the gym, change clothes, workout, shower, and drive back home. Forget all that – you can just WORKOUT. Load up YouTube, your favorite fitness app, or a yoga routine for 15-30 minutes in a comfortable space and start the calorie burning. That’s it! Bonus: you’ll be saving travel time as well as money formerly spent on a gym membership. Also, you don’t need to worry about what you look like – you can workout in your pajamas with hair that resembles a deranged mental patient’s – and then shower. No fancy clothes, make-up, or other props needed for dealing with the public as you would at a gym.
      3. Make it fun with metrics! Lots of our clients enjoy competing against themselves (and their friends) when it comes to getting their steps in or seeing how many calories they burned in the day. Some have even found that the technology has helped in avoiding higher-calorie, lower-quality food choices that could sabotage their efforts.
      4. Get up early to exercise. Starting the day with a metabolic-boosting workout from the comfort of our homes is a great way to start a productive day. It also means no longer have to deal with the obstacles that stand in our way to exercise at day’s end.
2. Give it a try and let us know how these tips work for you!

An Experiment in Early Rising & Exercise

Waking up early is tough. Finding time to workout is even tougher.

For most of us, arranging time for a workout is even more of a challenge than the exercise itself. Along with pulling ourselves out of bed, working hard all day, and either making dinner, taking children to activities, grocery shopping, paying bills, or may even relaxing for once…..where does the time go? Certainly, as the day progresses, we realize working out simply isn’t in the cards. Then we feel the guilt and shame as we say to ourselves, ‘well, maybe tomorrow’.

During an early morning sweat-fest, a hot yoga studio instructor shared this maxim: “at 6 A.M., the only obstacle standing between me and my workout is ME; by 6 P.M. all sorts of obstacles exist to prevent me from working out.” Truer words may have never been spoken.

With repeated exposure to articles and TED Talks touting the benefits of waking early to exercise as one of the activities successful, productive people do, a couple of us here decided to try an experiment. We committed ourselves to waking up before dawn and working out before our day started – all in the name of science.

To be honest, we’ve long envied those dedicated individuals who wake up and engage in an intense sweat session, shower, eat a healthy breakfast, meditate and then start their workday, refreshed and ready to pounce on their assignments. Who WERE these people anyway? And….would we feel the same?

For the sake of testing the ‘early bird catches the worm’ hypothesis, we will do this – for you, our dear readers – following the scientific method. Just for fun.

Questions

Are people who wake up early fitter, happier, more productive and successful? What factors play into such aspects? How will waking up early impact energy and focus throughout the day?

Background Research

According to an article on Forbes, early rising is a trait associated with CEOs, political heavyweights, and other influential people. So we have some correlation here….not causation.

Some argue that if you get the same amount of sleep you would waking early versus later on, there’s no difference in productivity. There are a number of successful political figures, philosophical writers, psychologists, and inventors who were night owls. According to Russel Foster during his TED Talk on “Why do we Sleep,” he says ‘early to bed, early to rise…’ is a myth.

With regard to exercise, it seems as though early morning workouts may present some advantages, including having more focus during the rest of the day, using natural daily hormone cycles to your advantage, boosting your metabolism, and being less likely to skip the workout later in the day.

Our Hypothesis

We suspect (and dread finding out) that the early risers do, in fact, have some advantages over those who prefer to wake up closer to sun-rise, including increased dedication to physical fitness and productivity.

Testing the Hypothesis by doing an Experiment

Well this is where the rubber meets the road. A couple of us here at One Bite made a pact to run ourselves through this experiment and so on a few dreary, dark mornings we somehow found ourselves inside of a boxing gym or hot yoga, slightly before 6am. Accountability partnering does amazing things.

Analyze Data and Draw a Conclusion

Our sample size is small and we have tested waking up at 5am and performing a 6am workout 3x in two weeks. We kept our environment and schedule as we normally would (no built-in nap times or ‘light’ workdays). Our observations:

1. Getting enough sleep and having an accountability partner is key. Missing either one of these drastically reduces the possibility of an early morning workout.
2. Focus and productivity (caffeine-free) ran us well into the early afternoon before sleepiness and lethargy stepped in.
3. Feeling terrific and highly energetic until early afternoon
4. Having workouts that were varied and that we looked forward to doing was important.

Share the Results

Will we be waking up at 5am everyday? Certainly not. Early rising requires early sleeping and it just feels plain lame to be going to bed by 9pm – not to mention that it hampers social activities and actively works against  night-owl tendencies. However, we discussed creating a compromise with our own natural cycles in mind and working with them for an earlier morning in general.

We cannot over-emphasize how happy and accomplished we felt with having completed a workout by 7am – this alone won out over the alternative of scheduling a later-day workout but having a higher risk of skipping it. By all means, if an early morning workout just isn’t for you, ensuring proper exercise during other times of the day is better than nothing.

What are your thoughts? Will you try the experiment for yourself?