YOUR GUIDE TO A NEW YEAR OF FEELING THE BEST YOU EVER HAVE

As we close out the year, we are going to deviate from our typical Sunday Wellness newsletter and dive into how we can set ourselves up for a year of our best health yet and feel better than we ever have.

I will share a bit about my personal health journey, key takeaways and learnings, a helpful exercise to reflect on your year, and how to set goals and intentions for the new year.

I’ll cover tactical lifestyle changes we can all incorporate to feel our best and share my favorite better-for-you buys of 2024—the healthier products I can’t live without.

NEW YEAR REFLECTION EXERCISE 🗒️ 

In the notes app on my phone & computer I journal daily. Each day is a new journal entry with the date at the top.

At the end of every year I read back on all my entries and note the themes. What kept coming up over and over? Where did I keep getting stuck? What were the patterns?

I then write high level goals for the next year. What do I want to accomplish? What kept coming up as a frustration, or theme in the last year that I want to release or work on in the new year? What do I want to call into my life? Think big. You can have and become anything. If you believe it is coming to you, it will.

I then take my high level goals for the new year and figure out the daily habits I can practice that will help me achieve these goals over the course of the year.

I then commit to them and practice them, every day. It is empowering and energizing and it does work. You will pick your head up in a month, six months or at the end of the year and not believe how far daily, intentional practices took you.

I’ll give you an example how this works by sharing my 2024 process

Step 1 Reflection - Reading through my journal entries from 2023 a theme that kept coming up was frustration with my hormone imbalances, PMS and painful periods. I also felt stuck in a job that didn’t enable me to express my deepest passion of helping people live healthier lives and wanted to start something on my own but didn’t know where to start.

Step 2 Goal Setting - In 2024 two of my goals were to balance my hormones, regain a regular cycle and heal the underlying imbalances that were causing PMS and painful periods. I also wanted to start my own business and build something that was aligned with my entrepreneurial itch and passion for health & wellness.

Step 3 Create Your Daily Habits - So now I have my reflections that lead to my high level goals but to actually achieve these, I needed to create daily habits that will compound over time to help me achieve these goals. Here are a few of the daily routines I practiced in 2024

Daily Routines 2024

Hormones & Health

• Meditate for 5min every morning

• Write down 3 things I’m grateful for

• Eat nutrient-dense, whole foods prioritizing fat & protein and avoiding sugar & processed food

• Walk 12-15K steps a day

• Strength train 5-6 days a week

• Prioritize 7-8 hours of sleep

Starting my own business - do one of the following daily

• Work on functional nutrition certification

• Journal out ideas for business & vision

• Read books on the wellness space & on entrepreneurship

• Network with female founders

• Go to health and wellness events

• Listen to podcasts on female founders in the wellness space

And it worked! I started LFG and became certified in functional nutrition. The vision didn’t come overnight, but by doing something every day to get closer to it, it became clearer and clearer over time.

The same goes for my hormones. Committing to lowering stress through mindfulness and breathwork, building lean muscle, eating nutrient-dense foods that heal my body, and limiting toxin exposure enabled me to balance my hormones and regain a regular, mostly PMS-free cycle.

Small, daily habits compound into major changes overtime. What are your biggest most ambitious goals and what are the tactical daily habits that you can practice to get you there?

YOUR GUIDE TO A YEAR OF INCREDIBLE HEALTH 🥑 

Our health is in our control and is the most important thing we have.

Over the course of this year, I started a business in the wellness space, became certified in functional nutrition, deep-dived into the literature and studies about the state of our country’s health, and spent a significant amount of time advising health and wellness startups.

What stood out to me the most is that our country is in the midst of a health epidemic. Chronic diseases are on the rise, and so many of us “don’t feel good,” even in our 20s, 30s, and 40s. It is not normal to not feel good. When we don’t address why we feel this way, we allow the underlying dysfunction in our bodies to snowball into a chronic disease diagnoses.

Not feeling good is driven by lifestyle, and nearly all chronic disease is a function of poor lifestyle habits—whether it’s the food we eat, toxin exposure, lack of sleep, lack of movement, or stress.

We have the power to feel incredible today and prevent chronic disease. Our choices determine how we feel now and our state of health in the future.

Here are some shocking stats..

93% of Americans have poor metabolic health. Poor metabolic health is the driver of most chronic diseases, such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and dementia

Seventy-four percent of U.S. adults are overweight or obese

Half the country has prediabetes or type 2 diabetes, and cancer rates are skyrocketing.

Eighty-five percent of our health care costs are tied to preventable, food-driven illnesses

Chronic disease is preventable. It is driven by lifestyle. Not feeling great is a sign that chronic disease may be approaching. It means your body is not functioning optimally. If you are tired all the time, bloated, carrying excess weight, dealing with skin issues, anxiety, hair loss, fatigue, insomnia, period problems, infertility, or aches and pains, your body is not functioning optimally—and this is often a product of how we live

If we change our lifestyle to feel our best today, the byproduct will be the prevention of chronic disease later in life. We don’t need to feel bad, and not feeling good is not normal. We don’t need to jump to medications. We don’t need to normalize feeling unwell and then accept a chronic disease diagnosis later in life.

Our health is in our hands, and it is the most important thing we have. Here are a few of the most important lifestyle habits to incorporate to feel incredible and stay healthy.

🥑 EAT TO HEAL & ENERGIZE - Focus on eating plenty of vegetables, fruits, healthy fats (nuts, seeds, olive oil, avocado), organic/grass-fed proteins (chicken, fish, eggs, beef), beans, and grains. Eat real, whole foods. Avoid sugar, processed foods, and refined carbohydrates. If you can’t shop for every ingredient in something on its own in the grocery store, don’t buy it. Processed foods, sugar, and refined carbs create inflammation in our bodies, damage our cells, cause metabolic dysfunction, and create a fertile ground for chronic disease. Eat to heal your body, keeping it strong, healthy, and resilient.

👟 MOVE YOUR BODY - Exercise is critically important to our health. It strengthens our immune system, lowers inflammation, detoxifies chemicals from our body, boosts our metabolism, balances our hormones, improves our digestive system, enhances our sleep, and more. It also improves our mental health, clarity, and focus. Exercise is a longevity drug with only positive side effects—and it’s entirely free. Aim for 10–15K steps a day and strength train 4–6 days a week.

❌ AVOID TOXINS - We are swimming in a sea of toxins—from our personal care products, air, water, food, pharmaceuticals, and household cleaning products. Toxins are synthetic molecules that interfere with our cells' normal activities. They can disrupt our hormones, weaken our immune system, damage our gut, and cause chronic inflammation. If your immune system is too busy fighting toxins, cancerous cells can grow unchecked. It is critical to eat organic, filter our air and drinking water, stay away from plastic when you can, use non-toxic beauty and self-care products, and avoid processed foods, which are often loaded with toxins and synthetic ingredients.

😴 SLEEP - During periods of deep sleep, our brain carries out cellular repair, cleans up waste, and promotes healing. Sleep is critical to every aspect of our health, from regulating our mood and improving our immune system to enhancing metabolic health and supporting weight loss. We need 7–9 hours of high-quality sleep each night.

🧘‍♀️ STRESS MANAGEMENT - 98% of diseases are either caused or made worse by stress. When you feel tense or stressed, your body releases cortisol, putting you into a state of fight or flight. Being in this state lowers your immune system, elevates your blood sugar, alters your metabolism, harms your metabolic health, and causes systemic inflammation.

Think about it: your body doesn’t know the difference between real stress and perceived stress. If your mind is in a constant state of stress, your body will tighten, and all your energy will go toward preparing you to fight (even if a tiger isn’t chasing you). Instead, we want our energy to be spent on repairing our systems, cleaning out waste, properly digesting and absorbing nutrients, and functioning optimally.

Try incorporating practices like box breathing, breath work, journaling, gratitude, prioritizing downtime and relationships with family and friends, and setting healthy boundaries with work. Getting outside and spending time in nature can also make a world of a difference in lowering stress and grounding us.

MY FAVORITE BETTER FOR YOU BUYS OF 2024 💚 

If your goal is to feel better, improve your health, and live your best life yet, but you don’t know where to start, work with us for 1:1 lifestyle implementation coaching.

We will dive into your goals and daily routines to create a personalized plan that helps you feel your best in an approachable, sustainable way that fits your lifestyle❤️ 

Book a discovery call here 🫶🏻

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