My healthy tweaks to kick-start my year

Hi everyone,

I hope you have all had a good start to the year. Personally I have had quite a slow start to the year, I felt pretty sluggish and was feeling the need to find my mojo again. Do you get like this? I felt quite uninspired even with the promise of a fresh new decade. Along with all that, we then get bombarded with all the weight loss adverts and detox brands wanting us to juice away the Christmas weight. I actually had one of the local weight loss group leaflets through my door on boxing day!!! I mean really! Personally I find all of that a bit too much. I don’t want to starve myself for a week drinking nothing but green algae.

So what am I doing to get my mojo back? Well I can tell you what I am NOT doing. I am not giving up a thing, not one thing! I don’t want to do dry January, I enjoy a glass of red wine and I still want to have it. I LOVE cheese so I’m not giving that up either. What I will be doing is tweaking. In fact I’m going to call it the tweak program. A tweak here and a tweak there across all areas of my life. Exercise, nutrition and organisation, planning etc… you get the picture.

One thing I do know is that if you pile on a load of big changes in your life you are setting yourself up to fail. So a handful of small changes bit by bit can make all the difference.

So here we go, some of things I am doing to get my mojo back…

Exercise

You guys already know that I love to go walking. I love to get the kids out at the weekend and go for a country walk but during the week when they are at school I get in a proper beach walk. So I am trying to up my game just a little bit with this. Outside walking is good for the soul, you can breathe fresh air and get some head space. I walk between 5K-10K depending on how much time I have.

As this is something I already did I have just added the prospect of getting in an extra day doing this a week. So before, I perhaps did it twice, now I am aiming for 3 times. Nothing major but enough of a tweak. Or I challenge myself to walk that little bit further on the days I do go. My Fitbit Versa is one of my favourite wellness things that I have ever bought and it encourages me to get my 10,000 steps. I keep an eye on my heart rate while I walk with it and make sure I am staying in the ‘fat burn’ range.

I have a confession. My name is Katy and I have a gym membership that I hardly use!! Yup, how many of you are the same? So this is something I want to make an effort not to waste. When the weather is bad then I will now swap the walk for the running machine, which I really just do a fast walk on an incline. I will also try and run a little in short bursts to work on my cardio. My tweak however is that I want to add in a class each week. Not 5 classes, just 1 and I will aim to grow that in the future. Baby steps. I am going to try Pilates as I have never done it before.

Nutrition and gut health

As I said above I am not going start cutting things out all over the place. What I am going to try and do is learn more about nutrition. I think if I start to understand what I am getting from my food then I will start to see food in a healthier way. I have been reading the 8Greens Cook book by Dawn Russel. We will be bringing 8 Greens to QVC in February and I’m really exciting about it and will tell you more once I have trailed the supplement.

You may think it’s odd to read a cook book but there is loads of great information in it to learn about the benefits of various nutrients which are easy to add to meals. Off the back of it I have changed at least one meal in my day – again tweaking. I always go to toast, bagels or croissants in the morning so I am trying to change that to natural unsweetened yoghurt with blueberries, granola and chia seeds. Live yoghurt is great for gut health, the chia seeds are full of omega3, calcium, fibre and iron and more. Blueberries are a great antioxidants. Bosh! If on some days I want a croissant though, I’m having one.

As you can now guess I’m a bread junkie so I often go for a sandwich for lunch. Usually a pretty bog standard ham and cheese one. Not really getting much from that am I? So I will change things up by not taking away my love of bread entirely but going for yummy wholemeal toast with smashed avocado with a little sprinkle of sea salt and chilli flakes. I love this meal and it’s super quick to make too. Avocado is a superfood and a healthy fat which is so good for you.

I also really love scrambled eggs and spinach as a go-to lunch. Great protein and the spinach is packed with vits. I sauté the spinach in a pan with a little olive oil, pop that on the plate and then do the egg in the same pan. I crack the eggs straight in and use a rubber spatula to scramble them on a mid heat so not to cook too quickly. I always turn them out of the pan just before they over cook. I like them glossy. They carry on to cook on the plate with its own heat. I use one of those flavour grinders that’s a mix of salt, garlic, and fennel seeds and herbs. (I try not to add too much salt but a little to taste is all good and I never use table salt)

I have started to drink Kombucha! What the heck is that eh? Kombucha is another thing that is fantastic for gut health. We are learning more and more about how important our gut health is, it’s a massive part of our immune system so it’s so important. Kombucha is a fermented tea packed with live bacteria for the gut. Sounds gross but it’s actually really nice. You can now get it everywhere as it’s gone pretty mainstream. We even have bottles of it in our QVC canteen! A simple addition to my week but a really positive one.

Manuka Honey! This is a two second tweak each morning. I have a big teaspoonful of it straight from the tub each morning. It was the 8 Greens book that made me go straight to the shops to get some of this. It has to be high level New Zealand Manuka Honey. I have level 15+. It’s expensive but so far it seems to be worth it. It’s thought to be antibacterial and good for digestion etc. There are many more benefits so give it a Google.

This last few weeks there have been a record number of presenters off sick from work and I can’t help wondering if it’s these last two tweaks that have helped me avoid the dreaded lurgy… watch me go down like a ton of bricks now because I said this out loud!!

Hydration

I have often had three cups of regular tea with milk by 9am! I love my tea and won’t be cutting it out. I will however try and swap some of them throughout the day for hot water with fresh lemon. It’s great for digestion and flushes through the system.

I also am trying to drink more water in my day. I already use the fab water bottles from QVC (I have the flamingo set) while on the go but I need to remember to drink more. Thankfully my Fitbit does a little buzz on my wrist throughout the day to remind me to have a drink of water.

So there we go. Nothing too crazy, nothing too challenging. Just a few changes here and there, a few swaps or add-ins and not really denying myself too much. If I want a biscuit I will have one, I just have to try not to have the packet!! I have been known to polish off a packet of chocolate digestives in one sitting!

Bit by bit I shall add more in as I go. I shall share more things I’ve done along the way. I have also been listening to a lot of great health, nutrition and wellbeing podcasts and this week the Inside QVC podcast is on all of those things featuring Rae Carpenter, Dr Max Gowland and Jack Morrison from Your Zookie. Click here to listen.

Let me know if you are making any changes to your lifestyle, I would love to hear your tips or things you have discovered. Do also check out the Health and Wellbeing page on QVC for some great videos and products.

Lots of love
Katy xxx

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