Episode #70: Mastering Your PCOS Routine: Daily Success Strategies

If you’ve ever felt like you’re just floating with your health goals, you have ideas of what you want to change, you’ve done your research, you’ve discovered your PCOS root cause, and now you’re trying to take action, but you feel like you have a couple of steps that you’re trying to incorporate in your daily life, and they just seem to be out of reach, or you feel like you’re floating, or you can’t quite get them in your grasp, then you’re going to love this episode because we’re going to go step by step how to master your daily routine so that you can have success long term in your PCOS health. So let’s get started.

You’re listening to the PCOS repair podcast where we explore the ins and outs of PCOS and how to repair the imbalances in your hormones naturally with a little medical help sprinkled in. Hi, I’m Ashlene Korcek, and with many years of medical and personal experience with polycystic ovarian syndrome, it is my joy to watch women reverse their PCOS as they learn to nourish their body in a whole new way. With the power of our beliefs, our mindset, and our environment, and the understanding of our genetics, we can heal at

the root cause. Welcome back to the PCOS Repair Podcast, where today we’re going to be discussing how to master your daily PCOS routine, some daily success strategies, so that you can feel in control and confident and really excited about your progress on your journey to PCOS health. There’s nothing more discouraging than feeling like it’s within your reach if only you could get your act together. We all feel like that from time to time, and ultimately, we need to give ourselves grace because there will be days like that but how do we set ourselves up so that we have fewer days like that and spend most of our time plotting forward, excited about the improvements that we’re making, the progress that we have, but ultimately feeling just confident in ourselves that we’re making the changes necessary to achieve the results that we want.

Step one is always having a plan and first part of having a plan is really knowing what you need to do. That’s always going to start with discovering your PCOS root cause, understanding the science and the metabolic and endocrine and hormone connections that are going on in your body and how they relate to your environment so that you have a clear picture of what habit changes, what things you want to incorporate, what things you want to remove from your daily lifestyle. We’ve talked about that in other episodes. Those are things that I work with women on. But in this episode, I want to focus on how do we, once we have picked that habit or two or three, how do we create a plan that actually becomes successful in our day to day. I highly recommend, as you get started, that you pick one habit or one small aspect of your lifestyle. This could be as simple as a bedtime routine or drinking more water one thing at a time, simple, small, ideally something that’s going to be highly impactful. So if you already have a pretty good sleep routine, even though that may sound like a nice one to choose, I would pick something where you’re going to get some good bang for your buck but ultimately, one thing is a really good place to start, especially if you feel like these changes throw you, that they’re hard to make stick, that they’re hard to incorporate in your daily life. Sometimes that can simply be because we’re trying to do too much too fast with how much we already have going on in our daily lives. So why is planning so important?

Well, whether we have a conscious plan or not, there is a nebulous plan in place, at some point, you’re going to wake up, at some point, you’re going to eat, at some point, you’re going to leave the house or do whatever it is that’s going on in your day, you will go through those motions, you’ll probably brush your teeth, you’ll probably scroll through your phone. There’s just things that are going to happen. The more intentional we are about these plans, the more that our plan will be one that leads to the things that we want or our success. The less that we plan, the more that we will wonder at the end of the day what happened with our day and ultimately, whether we meant to or not, we plan to “fail” and feel discouraged about how our day unfolded. So whether we realize it or not, we are planning. The lack of planning leads to being discouraged at the end of the day a well thought out plan that is reasonable and attainable and not setting us up for failure allows us to succeed in our day. I’m not someone who has to have a super detailed plan.

If you are highly type A, you probably are someone who has a very detailed plan and you know exactly what time you’re going to get up and you have every little thing planned out. I would caution that personality type that sometimes we overplan, and by overplan, I mean we forget to plan in the unexpected because we don’t like the unexpected and so when we’re a type A, and I used to be very type A now with three children, I’m a little bit less type A. I’ve had to relinquish some of my type A-ness but I understand from the type A point of view how hard it was for me to accept that no matter how well I planned out my day, there would be disruptions that were unplanned and so creating space for that, not overplanning yourself, not overcommitting and overextending yourself was my best way of setting up my three top priorities, making sure those happened, and then the rest of it was bonus. When you’re thinking about your health goals, let’s say that drinking a gallon of water a day is your goal, just because it’s a simple example. If your goal is to drink a gallon of water a day, do you want to drink a gallon of water at nine o’clock at night?

Now, if this was your goal and it was your priority and you were staying true to yourself of meeting your priorities and making sure they happened, sure, you could drink a gallon of water at nine o’clock at night but I wouldn’t recommend it. Your stomach is going to feel full, you’re going to be up all night having to use the bathroom, and you’re going to have been dehydrated all day long. So better would be if your priority is to drink a gallon of water a day to when you first wake up, get started right away. It energizes your body. It wakes up your digestive tract. It helps you feel alive and awake and rehydrated for the day. It decreases your risk of brain fog and then, of course, you can have other beverages as well throughout the day but get that water started first thing in the day. Start your priority early on so that you are ready and primed to continue it as you go. The more that we put it off throughout the day, even if it’s something that’s only one thing that we can do later, unlike trying to get a certain amount of water in, when we put it off, we start to feel like it’s hanging over us and it starts to feel more daunting. It’s like we’re procrastinating and so when we think about that task, it can become bigger and more ominous than it really is and so if we get up and we start chipping away at whatever our priority is earlier, the better in our routine, the more likely we’re going to feel excited and successful in our endeavors and continue to carry through. Another important part of planning is to make sure that anything you’re going to need ahead of time, anything that’s going to require a little bit of thought has been planned out. So for me, this looks like I know what workout I’m going to do in the morning. I have, again, this is going back to being maybe a less type A planner. Okay, so let’s think more, but if you’re more type B. So I have a loose plan. I will do 2-3 depending on the week. I alternate to fit in other types of workouts as well of leg and glute strength. Then I will add in things like upper body, I’ll do core. Those are my strength routines. I like to do some stretching and yoga to do more mobility and flexibility training and then I also like to do some cardio, which will include some stationary cycling or outside, depending on weather and scheduling. It takes a little bit more effort to get outside. I will do running, more slow paced, prolonged endurance running, as well as maybe a shorter time frame intensity interval training where I’m doing more speed work and then I also do just I’ll go for a run in nature or hike in nature just to get outside, change my scenery and those type of runs tend to be a little bit more mentally uplifting and things as well as compared to just getting the work out done.

So you can see I have this list of things that I like to accomplish in a week. However, it’s not highly planned out. Now, in a perfect world, I would sit down and I would that out further and now that my kids are back in school, maybe I will do that but for now, it’s just been the week flies at me. A lot of the schedule is not under my control. It’s things that are constantly revolving around my husband’s schedule and my kid’s schedule and so when I think about what I’m trying to accomplish, I go through it and I’m like, okay, these are the ones I still need to do. What am I going to do tomorrow? In that, the very least of the planning that I do is set out the workout clothes that correspond to the one that I’m going to do when I first wake up. That way, when my alarm goes off and I’m already wanting to figure out how I could fit my work in later and I could just work out maybe after I drop the kids off at school or when I first get home from the day, and I’m trying to think about how I could just reset my alarm for an hour, I don’t have a ton of excuses and barriers between me and my workout. My workout clothes are already folded and at the side of my bed. I know what workout I’m going to do so I can mindlessly roll out of bed and slowly wake up as I get ready and as I head out the door. This is the type of planning that sets me up for success because I have less barriers between the thought and the intention of doing it and the actually getting it done.

A lot of times when we think about our week, the next step here is how do we combat the chaos? There’s just chaos throughout the week. There’s chaos, whether it’s your work environment or your social environment. There’s just things that are constantly going on and type B people, typically, like when I’m thinking I’m being in more of my type B type of personality because I can go back and forth a little bit and when I’m more in my type B-esque side of my personality, I like to go with the chaos, see what’s going on, be a little bit more spontaneous and be lost in the moment, which is great, and it’s an amazing practice, and I encourage all of you, type A or type B, to experience that more and more and more because it’s where we tend to be more present, and it’s a good thing. On the flip side, though, it can also be something that pulls us off of what our priorities were for the day and so when we think about combating the chaos of our day, we want to think about what are our top priorities. So it’s a really good idea, it’s a really good habit to the night before think about what are the things you absolutely have to do. So there’s the things that are going to happen. You’re going to remember to put clothes on before you leave the house. You’re going to remember to brush your teeth. You’ll remember at some point in the day to feed yourself because your body will remind you. Aside from those, and if you have commitments, like you have to go to work, things like that, you’re going to do those. In your free time, where you have the space to make decisions, where you have the space to mindlessly scroll through social media, or where you have the time to diligently get something that you wanted to get done, we know those times in our day. What are your top three to five priorities that absolutely have to happen? Make sure that your health goal priority is on that list. It’s going to be right there with making sure you pay the bills, that the rent got paid, that you picked up the groceries that you needed, that you fed the dog, all of those things that you know need to happen.

So with that, although life in the day will take on its own flavor, its own chaos, its own stresses, its own excitement, and its own distractions, what is it that you have to get done? Make sure you know those priorities, and that’s really going to help you combat that chaos. It’s also really helpful, step three, is having some degree of tracking involved. When we feel like we have this priority and we’re fitting it into our day, it can become a little bit mundane and a little bit like, Oh, yeah, I’m doing this thing and if we don’t see the progress of it, it’s difficult to keep the excitement about it. Now, most health endeavors, we don’t see progress every single day. Usually, it takes a week or two at most to start seeing or feeling progress. So depending on the habit that you’re trying to incorporate. I would encourage you to find some way of tracking it. If you’re trying to increase your sleep quality, I want you to just have maybe a journal note that you write down, How did you feel? The first starting point, maybe be more elaborate. All the things that you’re not feeling, all the things that you want to feel, why are you doing this. Just jot all those down, maybe put a couple of headings and just a quick couple of thoughts. It doesn’t have to be beautifully written just so that you have something to go back and look at to compare where you started from. If it’s something like you are starting a new strength training or you’re starting a new cardio program or ideally a combination of the two, maybe take a before picture. Maybe take a picture every single day, even though it’s not going to be any change, just to get in the habit of focusing on appreciating the muscles that you’re seeing, evaluating where you’re at, evaluating that like, Yeah, this is still a goal of mine because I still feel like my arms are not looking quite as strong as they want them to be and it’s not a judgment. It’s not a self-critic thing, but you’re continually motivating yourself and looking at the progress of where you’ve come. On a daily basis, maybe too much. Sometimes it’s more a weekly check-in. It just depends on what it is that you’re doing. It depends on your personality. It depends if it’s going to be a positive or a negative.

You want to stick more with the positive, but you do want to find something that is going to help you track so that periodically you can check in and be like, Oh, my goodness, I really am making progress. Look at that bicep definition. It’s starting to actually show. These are things that then help us stay motivated and help us continue to keep that health goal a priority. So then we talked a little bit about being overwhelmed, but in the process of not becoming overwhelmed, the next step is to create a comprehensive plan.

So going back to you discovered your PCOS root cause, you’re looking at what it’s going to take to adjust your lifestyle to nurture and nourish your hormones and to help them to heal. So you might have a whole list of things that you want to start doing. Maybe there’s foods that you want to start eating or foods that you want to reduce in your diet. Maybe there’s an exercise program, some mindset work, all of the things, some stress management and some self-care, some ways that you’re going to start incorporating all of the things that you have learned in your life.

Making a list of all of those is really helpful because as you have made your first priority a priority for day after day after day, and as you see the success begin to come with that, even if it’s just the success of it’s happening, I’m now doing this new thing, even if you haven’t begun to see the results yet because those can take a little time, at some point, it’s time to add in habit number two and so that way, you can slowly progressively add to and flush out the full lifestyle that you’re trying to do. Now, some of us can do more and quicker than others. It has to do with our current situation, our support system, our understanding of what we will take of us. It also has to do with our past history of doing healthy things for ourselves. If we have never cooked healthy or ever cooked period, assuming that we are going to start cooking healthy and cutting up all of these vegetables and prepping all this food for three meals and two snacks a day, that is going to become overwhelming extremely quickly and probably setting ourselves up to fail. It’s so much better to start with one meal and keeping it really simple and then growing from there.

I can’t stress enough that the final step here that I want to talk about is taking it one step at a time. As you take it one step at a time, you’re going to identify and be able to remove any obstacles, anything that is a roadblock for you because you will see clearly, this is what I started doing. This is where the struggle came in. What are some of the solutions to this struggle so that I can continue making this new change a priority? As we start to see these really simple things. In recap, basically, we’re identifying what it is that we’re trying to change. What is our priority here? We’re making a priority. We’re planning it into our day. We’re setting out our clothes, or preparing our water bottle, or setting out our cooler to pack our lunch the next day, or prepping it the night before, and allowing ourselves to really step by step by step, set ourselves up so that our next move is in line with what we want it to be and that way, we’re not constantly fighting against ourselves and feeling like this new thing that I have to do is so cumbersome and so heavy. But instead, Oh, this is actually really nice. I already know what I’m going to have for lunch, or I wake up and instead of trying to figure out what’s going on my day, I just put my workout clothes on, go through the motions. And before I know it, my workout has happened, and it’s only six in the morning and I’m already on a winning streak. That confidence boost of getting up and going into autopilot that’s in line with what it is that you’re trying to add in and grow in your life is really exhilarating. I’m excited for you to start to experience that

And so there you have it, my friend. A couple of steps to really help you to master your PCOS health daily routine and set you up with some daily success strategies. I cannot wait to hear which ones you start to implement and choose, so please let me know over on Instagram. You can find me @Nourishedtohealthy and either drop me a comment or shoot me a DM.

I look forward to hearing how you are going to implement your daily success strategies into your weekly routine and your daily routine and how you’ll plan them out and how you’re going to start seeing them to take form and transform your PCOS health. So until next time, bye for now.

Did you know that studies of PCOS epigenetics have shown that our environment can either worsen or completely our PCOS symptoms? I believe that although PCOS makes us sensitive to our environment, it also makes us powerful. When we learn what our body needs and commit to providing those needs, not only do we gain back our health, but we grow in power just by showing up for ourselves. This is why I’ve created a guide for you to get started. My PCOS Fertility Meal Guide can be found in the show notes below. I want to show you how to create an environment that promotes healing while still being able to live a life that you enjoy. This guide is completely free, so go get your copy now so that you can step into the vision that you have for your life and for your health.