How to Smash Your Life Goals by Getting Fit and Wealthy

Are you sick and tired of feeling unhappy with your life, and unable to change it? Do you want to smash your life goals and create an awesome future for yourself? If so, you are not the only one. Many people struggle with feeling stuck in the loop, in the rat race, in their personal and professional lives. But, you don’t have to settle for this as your reality. By getting fit and wealthy, you are doing the two main things that will create the discipline and respect needed to smash your life goals. Here are some simple steps you can take to start your journey:

• Set SMART goals for your fitness and wealth. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. SMART goals are clear, realistic, and trackable. They help you focus on what you want to achieve and how you will get there. For example, instead of saying “I want to get in shape”, you can say “I want to lose 10 kg in 6 months by eating clean and working out regularly”. Instead of saying “I want to make money”, you can say “I want to make $10,000 in a year by cutting crap expenses and increasing my income”. SMART goals give you direction, motivation, and accountability.

• Create a plan and a budget for your fitness and wealth. A plan and a budget are essential tools for achieving your goals. They help you organize your actions, resources, and time. They also help you monitor your progress and adjust your strategy if needed. For example, you can create a plan and a budget for your fitness by deciding what kind of diet and exercise you will follow, how much you will spend on food and fitness, and how often you will check your weight and fitness indicators. You can create a plan and a budget for your wealth by deciding how much you will save, invest, and spend, what kind of income sources and opportunities you will pursue, and how often you will review your financial statements and goals.

• Take action and stick to your plan and budget. The most important step is to take action and stick to your plan and budget. Without action, your goals will remain dreams. Without consistency, your results will be short-lived. You need to take action and stick to your plan and budget every day, every week, every month, and every year. You need to overcome procrastination, laziness, temptation, and distraction. You need to develop discipline, habits, and routines that support your fitness and wealth. You need to celebrate your achievements, learn from your mistakes, and keep improving.

• Seek support and guidance from others. You don’t have to do this alone. You can seek support and guidance from others who can help you achieve your fitness and wealth goals. You can find mentors, coaches, advisors, or experts who can teach you, inspire you, and hold you accountable. You can join communities, groups, or networks of like-minded people who can share their experiences, tips, and resources with you. You can also ask for help from your family, friends, or colleagues who can support you, encourage you, and cheer you on.

Smashing your life goals by getting fit and rich is not easy, but it is possible. By following these simple steps, you can start your journey and transform your life. Remember, you are the boss of your own life. You have the power to change your situation and create your own happiness.

Of course, all of the above is not easy, but if you make it simple and build on one habit, one action step at a time, you will get there faster than you think.

Until Next Time,

Take Back Control

How to Keep Healthy Over the Festive Season

We Over-indulge every year from Christmas to New years…

The festive season is a time of joy and celebration, but also a time of temptation and indulgence. It can be hard to resist the abundance of delicious food and drink that surrounds us, especially when we are in a festive mood and socialising with friends and family. However, over-indulging in food and drink can have negative consequences for our health, such as weight gain, digestive problems, dehydration, and hangovers. How can we enjoy the festive season without over-indulging in food and drink? Here are some tips and strategies, backed by evidence from scientific research, that can help us moderate our consumption and maintain our health.

Eat Mindfully

One of the keys to avoiding over-indulgence is to eat mindfully. Eating mindfully means paying attention to what, how, when, and why we eat, and being aware of our hunger and fullness cues. Eating mindfully can help us enjoy our food more, eat less, and feel more satisfied. Research has shown that eating mindfully can reduce binge eating, emotional eating, and food cravings, and improve weight management and metabolic health.

To eat mindfully, we can:

• Eat before we go to a party. That way we won’t be super hungry and we’ll be less likely to over-indulge. Only eat when we’re hungry or at a designated meal. Mindless eating just because food is there means we’ll easily consume too many calories in a day.

• Choose quality over quantity. Instead of filling our plates with everything we see, we can select a few items that we really want to try, and savor them slowly and deliberately. We can also opt for healthier options, such as fruits, vegetables, lean proteins, and whole grains, and limit our intake of high-fat, high-sugar, and high-salt foods.

• Pause and check in with ourselves. We can take a break between bites and ask ourselves if we are still hungry or full. We can also use the hunger scale, which ranges from 1 (starving) to 10 (stuffed), to rate our hunger and fullness levels. Ideally, we should start eating when we are at a 3 or 4, and stop eating when we are at a 7 or 8.

Drink Moderately

Another key to avoiding over-indulgence is to drink moderately. Drinking moderately means limiting our alcohol intake and staying hydrated. Drinking moderately can help us avoid dehydration, hangovers, and alcohol-related health problems, such as liver damage, high blood pressure, and increased risk of cancer.

To drink moderately, we can:

• Follow the recommended guidelines. According to the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), to reduce the risk of harm from alcohol-related disease or injury, healthy adults should drink no more than 10 standard drinks per week and no more than 4 standard drinks on any one day. A standard drink is equivalent to 10 grams of pure alcohol, which is about 100 ml of wine, 285 ml of regular beer, or 30 ml of spirits.

• Break up the booze. We can reduce the amount we drink by having a glass of water between each alcoholic drink and opting for lower-sugar mixers such as soda water or mineral water. We can also skip other energy-dense drinks like soft drinks and fruit juice and opt for a sparkling water with fresh lemon or lime instead.

• Drink for the right reasons. We can avoid drinking alcohol to cope with stress, boredom, or negative emotions, as this can lead to excessive and unhealthy drinking patterns. Instead, we can drink alcohol for enjoyment and socialization, and find other ways to deal with our feelings, such as talking to someone, exercising, or meditating.

Make Christmas day the only day you over-indulge if you need to!

Having one day throughout the week between Christmas and new years the day you let loose a little bit will help with feeling like you are missing out and you will remind you of why we don’t over-indulge. We need that little reminder as to why we don’t over-indulge all of the time, a reminder of the bloating, gassy, potentially meat-sweats, hangover and lethargy that come with over-eating and drinking.

Simply the body saying we may have over-done it and forcing you to stop and rest, as you need to digest the food and drink that you have just consumed. By having one day where you let loose, you can then feel content, helping you need to make sure that the rest of the week is therefore “back to routine,” where you eat and drink mindfully. Of course, this contradicts the not “over-indulging” part, but sometimes we are not able to stop ourselves and resort back to our base needs and habits, we are only human after all. By making a decision that Christmas day will be the only day you indulge a little bit more, you are setting yourself up to succeed throughout the rest of the week.

The festive season is a wonderful time to celebrate and indulge, but it doesn’t have to come at the expense of our health. By eating mindfully and drinking moderately, we can enjoy the festive season without over-indulging in food and drink all week. We can also remember that the festive season is not only about food and drink, but also about spending quality time with our loved ones, expressing gratitude, and spreading joy. By focusing on these aspects, we can have a happy and healthy festive season.

Until next time,

Take Back Control

What To Do When Feeling Burnt Out?

Burn out, its a term that has been used consistently over the last five years especially. According to the Queensland government, burn out is a state of complete mental, physical, and emotional exhaustion.

You may feel as if you are tired all of the time, or simple tasks that use to be easy actually feel extremely overwhelming. You may be feeling irritable and find yourself feeling frustrated at small things more often than not. You could even feel symptoms of anxiety and even depression due to being burnt out.

There are of course varying degrees of burn out, but sadly Australians in 2021 and beyond have been experiencing burn out more than most other countries according to a global study completed by Global Consultants McKinsey. In fact, 61% of Aussies were experiencing stages of burn out, which is the highest rate in any other country.

Now, we could blame plenty of outliers and situations that are causing said burn out, but today we want to focus on what you can do when you are feeling burnt out and what coping mechanisms you could put in place to help you in your every day to day life.

Burn Out Remedies -

1.Take it easy on yourself and stop expecting so much of yourself (You may not feel it, but to this point in time, you are truly doing an amazing job).

Admittedly, this is not so much a remedy, but just a reminder to be kind to oneself. You are doing the best you can, with the resources and skillset you have right now at this point in time. Therefore, putting more and more pressure on yourself is only going to cause more mistakes and that is when the burn out will increase significantly.

2. Take the breaks you are entitled to!

You cannot sustain long periods of constant work for months and years on end, your body and mind are actually not suited to consistently working on the one task or sitting at a desk for ten hours straight. You need to make sure that you are taking the break’s where you can, such as your lunch breaks, annual leave/holidays, sick days when you are feeling too ill to work. In Australia, we are known for always battling through, but when it gets to the point where you are battling through for years on end, your going to burn out sooner or later.

3. Go on little sabbaticals, or short-term retirements.

A weird one and not overly used in Australia, but something that is catching on a little bit more these days…

People are quitting their work and deciding to not work for 3-12 months at a time, to re-energise themselves and build up that battery that has been so depleted from working for years on end. Something that is truly worth thinking about if you can do it financially and have been burning the candle at both ends for years at a time.

4. Take up a hobby and go to the gym.

Of course, an ex-personal trainer/gym owner is going to tell me to go to the gym… I know that is what you are thinking, but truly, we all know the benefits of keeping fit and staying healthy. However, taking up a hobby and exercising your creative juices are also just as important. Now everyone has different tastes and hobbies, so if you do not have anything that you do outside of work that makes you feel good, please go out and try a few new things. You will definitely find that having an outlet is going to be a massive win against burn out.

5. Find Your WHY!

The last and probably the most important remedy to burn out comes down to simply understanding why you do what you do.

The great philosopher, Aristotle said, “Knowing thyself is the beginning of all wisdom.”

To know ones self and why you wake up each day is the simplest and most under-rated of all things that you can do to reduce burn out and increase your own success. However, it is the hardest one of them all, because most of us do not dedicate the time needed to actually understand YOU!

Finding your why and understanding yourself takes years of reflection on your values and priorities, working out your strengths and weaknesses, and even when you have done all of the work it is on going, because we are forever shifting and changing. Therefore, you have to dedicate your life to personal development and carve out time each week, or month at the very least, to STOP and REFLECT.

Burn out can have mental, physical and psychological ramifications that can be detrimental to your health and the health of your family. According to the stats, you are most likely going to be burnt out in one point in your life.

Hence, by being able to create coping mechanisms and understanding yourself, you will be able to catch it when you are starting to burn out and hopefully save yourself from going over the edge.

Truly I hope that this can help, even if one strategy above can help you get through a tough period at work or in your family life, that means that you are slightly better off and you can go out and make the world a slightly better place because of it!

Until next time,

Take Back Control

How to Feel Less Overwhelmed and Less Stressed…

The general feel right now is one of anxiety and concern, everyone is feeling it a little bit more than usual right now. We have a workload that seems all-consuming, we have lives that are just too busy and on top of that we have interest rates going up, with an increase in cost of living happening at the same time…

No wonder we are all feeling like something is amiss, we are all a little less optimistic about the future and feel like there is a weight dragging us down.

The aim of this article today is to tell you, it is okay to feel all of those things! You are human, you are going to have good days and bad, that is natural to feel a little bit down or anxious. The other reason for this article is to hopefully give you some strategies I use throughout my everyday to help me live a life where I am not overwhelmed all the time or feeling like the stress of living is getting too much.

Of course, these strategies are not a fail safe, however they have helped me to get through some of the most stressful periods of my life and helped other family members as well.

Stress Less Strategy Number 1:

Take a break!

Stop what you are doing, if you feel a heaviness in the chest, starting to get a headache or feeling frantic, you need to catch yourself and just STOP.

Easier said than done, but if you are able to do this, you will find your stress decreasing significantly and your productivity increasing tenfold. Once you have caught yourself, take in 5 DEEP breaths, count 5 seconds in and 5 seconds out, this will take you under 60 seconds, but the significance of doing this one thing is astonishing.

Schedule your lunch breaks for the same time or thereabouts everyday, get into a routine of setting up great habits whilst at work. When you are on a lunch break, that means no looking at emails, no looking at a work phone or taking calls. Unless it is a serious emergency, which is not very likely, you will be able to get to that email or return that call after lunch.

Not everyday is going to be perfect, and there will be days where you may have to skip lunch. But you damn well make sure you take a lunch break the next day!

(This is the same for each of the next steps you can take as well to stress less and feel less overwhelmed!)

Stress Less Strategy Number 2:

Make sure you get a good nights sleep!

By getting a good nights sleep, this will set you up for the next day and not just that, but your body will have been able to reset.

Meaning when you wake up, your heart rate will be normal, stress hormones (Cortisol and Adrenaline) will have been regulated properly and your body will be able to regulate your appetite as well.

Meaning that you will eat normally, which will also decrease stress, as your digestive system is not working overtime/stressed.

Stress Less Strategy Number 3:

Get Moving!

Getting your body moving, whether that is for a walk, run, boogey or going to the gym, will deliver results beyond what you could even imagine.

By getting the body moving, you are not only going to improve your physical health, but your mental health as well.

Your body will secrete dopamine (The Happy Chemical/Hormone) after you exercise, making you feel good and like you have achieved something for the day for yourself.

Just get moving, no but’s about it!

Stress Less Strategy Number 4:

Say NO!

I cannot stress this one enough, saying no and setting boundaries is imperative to not getting overwhelmed.

If you were to say YES to everything, you would not just get overwhelmed, but swept off your feet and left a shell of your former self. By saying YES to everything, you will not be helping anyone, especially not yourself.

Therefore, you need to be able to learn to say NO.

Stress Less Strategy Number 5:

Finally, the last strategy is to set time out for YOU!

Understanding what gives you energy and makes you feel good is imperative to this strategy, as you need to set time out for doing things that will leave you feeling fired up and full of energy.

You may love to go for walks, or go to the movies, or going to nice restaurants. You may love an adventure in new lands, or to do nothing at all, read a book, journal or go for a run.

You need at least 45 to 60 minutes of YOU time everyday!

Definitely one of the hardest strategies to complete, but you need to do it. You need to keep up the interests and hobbies that you find are important, you need to reflect and spend time with yourself or friends/family. Spending at least 45 to 60 minutes a day doing something you love will leave you feeling less stressed and more productive.

Of course, there are multiple other strategies you can use to decrease stress and overwhelm, such as being more organised, planning for the future, eating better foods, setting yourself strong boundaries/standards, etc.

However, I have found the five strategies above to be perfect for reducing stress and overwhelm throughout the day and has helped me to live a better life, where I feel in control.

My productivity levels have increased significantly, motivation is never really a problem (on the odd occasion it can be) and you just feel better/more confident overall.

Let me know how you go with trying out the five strategies above, I would suggest starting with number one, which is really important for those who are working full-time. If you are not working full-time/part-time, I would suggest beginning with strategy number five.

Until next time,

Take Back Control