My Year-Long Healthy Living Project - Wanna Join the Fun?
For the past few weeks, my health has been calling me.
And it’s been telling me that it’s time. Time to take a year to strategically and deliberately level up my health.
Look, I’ve always been health conscious. I’m in good health and in a lot of ways, I’m really happy with where I’m at. Getting in shape post-partum ain’t easy! But I also have a lot of room for improvement. This last year I went around the sun for the 30th time, which is a big milestone. While I feel “30 and flirty and ready to thrive”, I also feel very aware of the ways life can get very real at 30 (if it hasn’t already!).
According to a peer-reviewed article called, Muscle tissue changes with aging, “muscle mass decreases approximately 3–8% per decade after the age of 30 and this rate of decline is even higher after the age of 60. This involuntary loss of muscle mass, strength, and function is a fundamental cause of and contributor to disability in older people, the age of 30 is when most people start losing muscle mass.”
Anecdotally, 30 also seems to be the time when many people start to cement habits that can drive them toward a healthy or unhealthy lifestyle. And those habits repeated over time have the potential to lead to chronic disease. I’m especially aware of this especially because I have a high genetic disposition for developing a disease called atrial fibrillation. It runs in my family and is something I need to aggressively do my best to avoid now.
Now does this mean that you’re toast if you’re over 30 and haven’t been exercising or have fallen into bad habits? ABSOLUTELY NOT. We are all changeable beings, capable of developing good habits, no matter how old we are. Additionally, even if you’ve lost muscle mass, there is a lot you can do in the arena of resistance training to counteract that and start putting muscle back on. Additionally, there is so much we can’t control - we all have the chance of developing a “preventable disease” due to circumstances outside our control. But my hope is to take very deliberate charge of my health and control as much as I can now and dial into my optimizing my health, my mind, and my body.
Born from this nudge from my health as well as from Gretchen Rubin’s blue-covered Happiness Project and Cait Flander’s Year of Less, I’ve come up with a year-long project. My very own healthy living project. And if you too, feel that your health is calling, please feel free to join me on this journey to feeling better, having more energy, and living more fully.
Keep reading and I’ll walk you through how my healthy living project is going to work! My hope is that you can get some ideas and inspiration for ways that you too can take charge of your own health.
My Healthy Living Project Parameters
The duration of my healthy living project will be 1 year - 52 weeks
Every two weeks, I will tackle a healthy living habit or task such as eating 5 fruits and vegetables each day, or completing a healthy kitchen makeover
To help each good habit stick and become automated, I will apply the principles taught in Atomic Habits, which is to make the habit “obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying.”₁ When ditching bad habits, I will make the bad habit “invisible, unattractive, difficult, and/or unsatisfying.”₁
I will report back on progress and lessons learned every two weeks.
At the end of every two weeks, I will complete body measurements, take progress photos, and check-in on general mood/energy for the past two weeks to track progress.
I reserve the right to move around the order in which I work on certain habits if needed
My Healthy Living Project Schedule
Weeks 1-2: Tracking to establish a baseline
This will include:
Taking measurements
Taking progress photos
Tracking sleep
Tracking physical activity (steps per day, and scheduled workout)
Mood
Reviewing labs from my last check-up to see what areas need the most attention
I will also do some more advanced assessments (which you don’t have to do if you are following along) simply because the fitness pro in me wants to geek out a bit
Calculate my VO2 max (a measure of cardio fitness) using the 1.5 mile test method
Pull-up & push-up test
Mobility test (overhead and single-leg squat test)
Dynamic posture test