You’ve made it to Week #4 of Brain Rehab! Congratulations! This week the focus is on putting it all together. Your focus this week is to take the prior week’s changes and add them all together now. Hopefully, you’ve already been doing this, building on each week with each new step being implemented. If you have not done it that way, no problem. This week you’re going to focus on food, exercise, and sleep. You can do it! Simply do your best, that’s always better than doing nothing at all.

Week #4: Putting it All Together

By now you’ve been eating right, exercising and sleeping better. The goal from here on out is to stick with this program and thought process. By the end of this week, you will have successfully implemented your new way of living for a month. You’ve done a great job and I’m sure are feeling the benefit of your work. Now is a great time to reflect back on the list of symptoms you wrote done prior to beginning this journey. Have they improved, reduced, completely gone away? Has the scale changed at all or do you at least notice your clothes fitting more loosely? Remember, you’ve been exercising which will build lean muscle mass. Muscle weighs more than fat, so you don’t always see the improvements by what the scale says. Re-do any of the measurements you may have initially taken or have your body fat percentage retested. How’s your blood pressure doing? Now is a great time to get your bloodwork redrawn as well to see how your physiologic blueprint has been positively impacted by your new way of life.

Here are some helpful tools to keep you on your new-found path towards optimizing not only your brain health but your overall health:

  • Plan your week in advance: we always use weekends to prep food for the upcoming week when the schedule is a bit crazier. Keeping healthy food on hand and ready to eat.Prep shopping lists and stick to what’s on the list. Also, don’t go to the store hungry. This is always an equation for disaster.
  • Keep your workouts on your schedule as non-negotiable times. Creating non-negotiable goals helps you dodge excuses that surface when you get lazy or life tries to get in the way.
  • Technology can make life much easier too. There are apps for anything! Track your workouts and see how you’re improving from week to week. These trackers also can show you how well and how long you’re sleeping. You can also get very diligent and track your foods to see what percentages of what you’re eating. We’re looking for carbohydrates to be 20% or less. Fat’s should take up most of your caloric intake and the rest comes from healthy proteins.
  • Don’t beat yourself up either if you temporarily fall off the bandwagon. Keyword = temporarily. Pick yourself up and get going again. If you can be perfect 80-90% of the time, your body will be able to handle the 10-20% when you’re not. The challenge is most Americans have this reversed and are only perfect about 20% of the time. Make the switch and notice the differences. This isn’t just a temporary diet or change in your life. This is your new lifestyle!
  • Find motivators: we all work better with goals in mind or finding something that helps motivate us. Motivators can be anything from running a 10K to planning a trip with the family to hike Mount Kilimanjaro. Keep sight of the big picture. People who are healthy and stay so fit and trim will say it’s a choice they make every day. I find this very empowering. It is your choice to make each and every day! What choice are you going to make?

I can’t wait to hear about your progress! I invite you to join my private Facebook Group. This group is for action-takers. It is a place to find accountability, motivation, help and so much more! I can’t wait to see you there!