Healthy Lifestyle Changes – Week 4

Jan 21, 2013 by Renee +

Week 3 Update:

Last week, the challenge was to healthify your breakfasts and keep up with your prior weeks’ challenges.

So just to review you should now be:

Eliminating sugary drinks, limiting alcohol and drinking more water
No snacking after dinner
Eating a healthy breakfast that consists of just less than 1/3 of your ultimate daily calorie goal

So…how did it go you ask?

ID 10054806 231x300 Healthy Lifestyle Changes Week 4

Oh! So ashamed!

Eh – some good, some bad

I did a little bit of backsliding this week. I had an after dinner snack one night and didn’t drink enough water on a few days. I did ok with breakfasts, except that I’ve realized that while I always eat breakfast and its usually pretty healthy, but I do tend to eat more towards the late morning which messes up my schedule a little bit.

On ward and upward though! One of the great things about checking in each week is that you can keep track of what you are doing well, where you need to improve more and just keep going.

Week 4 Challenge

Healthify Bedtime

Yes, more of the healthifying – and yes, I still know its not a real word. This week’s challenge really embodies making changes that are going to help you make even more healthy changes down the road though so healthify seems appropriate again. Here’s what we’re going to do:

Set a bedtime that means at least 7 hours of sleep.
Stop any screen related activity 1 hour before that time.

The bedtime: I know this one is hard. I have little ones. I know sometimes you won’t get to bed by this time because they just refuse to sleep. They need another story. They need a cup of milk. They need you to just sit in their room to keep away monsters. I know sometimes you won’t get 7 hours because, even once they do sleep, they’ll wake up a million times to pee, get even more milk, pee again (definitely too much milk), vomit (probably on you), poop themselves (milk allergy?!) or just cry.

I know you’ll set a bedtime thinking “Well, they usually get up at X hour so if I set a bedtime of Y then that should be good” – and then they’ll wake up 2 hours early almost every morning that week.

I know all of that. Do it anyway! The point is not really so much to get 7 hours of sleep. (Even though that would be HEAVEN.)

The real point – though – is just to set the intention to so that you have a clearly defined bedtime routine. One that involves shutting off the screens in your house because that may help your mind rest and make sleeping easier. Incidentally, it also will help free up some time that we’ll be using later on in another week’s challenge (hint hint!)

And who knows? Maybe some nights you will actually get a full night’s sleep!

So that’s it. If you are ready to move on to your next change then this week work on setting a bedtime and then shutting of the TV and computers 1 hour before it. Even if you don’t get to bed at that time then at least you have given your brain some rest from the visual stimulation.

If you already have a great bedtime routine: Awesome! You are ahead of the game so just keep up with the prior challenges until next week. If you had trouble with the breakfasts – give it a another week.

And – as a reminder: You can follow the challenges here and join us on Facebook if you want to do it with a group!

Images courtesy of Piyato, Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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