Happy New Year, my friend!

2024 is here, and everything that did or did not get accomplished for your body in 2023 is water under the bridge. So, let’s look forward and create a really good game plan on how you can feel physically better than you’ve ever felt in a long time. In fact, what if we implemented something that would help you feel younger, stronger, more energetic and significantly healthier in 2024… would you be up for it?

Cold plunging and other silliness.

A few weeks ago, out of the blue, my husband asked me if I wanted to try “cold plunging” with him. “WHAT?!”

Yes, cold plunging has been shown to have some great health benefits, like lowering inflammation, increasing metabolism, reducing brain fog, etc.

So, I’ve given it a try, starting with a few cold showers and I’m working my way up to having the bravery to dunk into my bathtub with cold water. Yikes!

But in my opinion, I would clump cold pluning into the same category as a lot of popular “bio-hacking” trends. These are all things that simply give you that final 1-2% edge for health.

Are you overwhelmed yet?

Women tell me all the time how they feel paralyzed to take any action. They’re afraid of doing something wrong, because there are so many conflicting and extreme ideas out there.

“So and so says I need to cold plunge, so add that to the list.”

“This influencer over here said that I need to be balancing my hormones, and doing intermittent fasting or measuring my blood sugars.”

“And then this person over here said that I need to be doing Zone 2 training and slow eccentrics. What on earth is zone 2 and what is eccentric!!”

You want to improve your health, but you do a quick search online or you follow a healthy person and they’re telling you things that are extremely intricate and overwhelming.

I had someone ask me on Instagram a few weeks ago about leafy greens. Someone told them that leafy greens are bad for your gut and kidneys, and so they stopped eating salads.

Salads are bad now.

What is happening?!

So frustrating.

I truly hate that the fitness and nutrition industry makes you feel this way. It’s not your fault, it’s that we have a lot of noisy people that are camping on one singular topic and convincing everyone else that that’s the magic bullet.

But do you know what is the magic bullet, every time? Whether you’re 35 or 65?

CONSISTENCY.

And this is my specialty my friend.

I remember two summers ago I was at a summer party, and I ran into an old mom-friend. She was telling me all about her keto-based intermittent fasting kick and how she’s been eating a lot more vegan, and then she was trying this new power-pilates type class that she had hear about.

And then after this went on for a while, she looked at me and said, “Well, you look great! What health kick have you been into lately?”

I smiled and said, “Oh, just the same thing I’ve been doing for the last 15 years.”

The BASICS STILL WORK. And if you can make them extremely basic and simple to do, you WILL be consistent. And that’s the key.

I’m going to walk you through the BASICS of your health. If you can become a true master of these 4 areas in very basic ways, it will get you 99% healthier, and you may never need to anything more extreme.

1) Nutrition

• Drink adequate amounts of water
• Eat PRO’s at every single meal
• Be mindful with splurges - always only opting for ones you enjoy, and never over-indulging

2) Fitness

• Move everyday
• Strength training 2-3x a week - More and more research is coming out showing the long-term health benefits of strength training
• At its simplest, you just need to be pushing and pulling your muscles against some kind of resistance (bodyweight or using equipment)
• What has been shown to be the most effective for joint health, bone health and overal functional strength is doing full ranges of motion in the 8-12 repetition range
• Incorporate movements that target the BIG 6: Muscular strength, cardiovascular stamina, flexibility, balance, coordination and power
• In a well-designed routine, you can get all of this in just a 20-30 minute workout

3) Stress

• Managing your stress levels on a daily basis
• A few weeks ago, I was stressed beyond measure (Scott was out of town, Christmas, driving, gearing up for JS30)
• Because I was so stressed, it completely impacted everything else.
• I was grabbing whatever food I could find. I was drinking more coffee than necessary. I found myself sitting on the couch scrolling through social media to numb out instead of going to bed early. And I didn’t have the energy to exercise.
• When your stress goes unmanaged, it impacts all the other aspects of your health, plus it wreaks havoc on your stress hormones
• There are probably stressful things in your life that just need to happen (like for me… kids had to be driven to school)
• But you need to put several proactive stress-relieving tactics in place each day to combat those stress hormones

4**) Sleep**

• You need between 6 and 8 hours of sleep every night
• If you’re not achieving this consistently, back up and look at your others habits during the day
• Did you eat enough?
• Did you exercise somehow?
• Did you manage your stress?
• Did you nap too much?
• Do you have a consistent wind down routine that happens at the same time every night?

I was recenlty working with a client that really struggled to sleep well at night, and much of that was hormone-related, but I said “I know that improving your sleep feels impossible - you can’t force yourself to fall asleep, so it largely feels out of your control. But let’s just see what happens if you focus on improving the other areas of your habit, and see what impact that ends up having on your sleep.”

And that is it! Just these 4 things…

• Basic nutrition
• Basic movement
• Basic stress management
• Basic sleep habits

These basics still work, especially when done consistently. This is 99% of your health right here. And if you can rally around these areas of your health, and simply dial these simple things in, you’re going to:

• Feel stronger,
• have less pain,
• have a faster metabolism,
• have balanced hormones,
• have better gut health,
• and even have less body fat!

But if you don’t do these basics consistently, and keep chasing the 1% things, you’re still going to be suffering from poor health. I don’t care how many cold plunges you do or gut health balancing detoxes you do, it’s going to do nothing if these basics aren’t happening.

Here’s some proof that it works.

I recently had a coaching call with a woman I train, and she was struggling with losing weight, especially weight in her torso.

• She had always been an athlete, she loved exercise and working out, and never missed a workout (was feeling stronger!)
• And her natural inclination when she wasn’t getting better results was to dial up the fitness even more - to get fancy with it.
• But I asked her to rate herself on the other buckets: nutrition, stress, sleep - she had to give herself a poor rating.

She was ready to do something extreme with her workouts, when all she needed to do was come back to the basics with the other areas of her health that were getting overlooked.

I had her eat more PRO’s, especially protein; I had her implement a stress-relieving moment into her day; and I had her try a couple tweaks that might help her sleep better.

• Simple things but they worked.

Your Call to Action

Our brains always like to go the extreme, and then wonder why we struggle with motivation.

Revisit your basics.

The one action step I want to leave you with today is to rate yourself on the Basics. Give yourself an honest score, and see which area needs some more of your attention and then work on improving that one thing by one or two notches.

Let this be the year that you become true master of the BASICS and you get CONSISTENT with those things. I would love for you to have the same conversation I had with my friend - what are you doing? Why are you so healthy? “Oh, still just doing the same basic things that work.”

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