Over the next few weeks, the fitness and nutrition industries are going to go crazy with all the New Year’s resolutions and making 2024, I can’t believe it’s already 2024, making this the year that you reach your physical potential and your best health, reach your weight loss goals and build the muscle and all the things the health and wellness industry are going to be promoting over the next month. Now, I actually love this time of the year. I think it’s a great motivation to join that energy and excitement about realizing this milestone of a new year, a new great time to think about and contemplate who you want to grow into over the next year but I’m not really a huge fan of resolutions, and I’m not really a huge fan of jumping on just out of the enthusiasm to some new program or some new thing. I like to think these things through a little bit more, especially when it comes to PCOS health, because each person has a unique situation and their root cause needs a specific approach. So with that, in today’s episode, we are going to be talking about how to feed off of all the excitement of the new year and all of the health and wellness buzz that will be going around but at the same time, what happens when that excitement fades and how to find both the path and the motivation that’s going to sustain you in making the healthy habits throughout the new year to really create the health that you want. All right, 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 talking about all of the excitement that comes with the new year rolling in, especially in the health and wellness space as people make resolutions and they start weight loss programs and they start going to the gym more and all of those things or if you’re someone who already goes to the gym regularly, how you’re going to still get your workouts in with so many more people trying to use the equipment that you normally use. All right, so first of all, I think it’s really important to just say it, the excitement fades. How do we stay motivated as the excitement of, okay, we’ve gotten through the holidays, whether we did good or bad throughout the holidays, we naturally see the new year as a new start, as a new commitment to who we want to be, of how we want to grow, what we want to accomplish in the new year, what we want to bring into our lives in the new year. So how do we keep that motivation? The first step is there, right? We’re excited. We’ve got this goal, which is great. It’s the first step but how do we keep that excitement when life happens? When we get unexpected curveballs, when life gets busy, when it just starts becoming less exciting, we’re less motivated about it, we have our interest shifts elsewhere. How do we continue to create the health that we said we wanted at the beginning of the year so that we don’t roll around the next year so that we’re not on the New Year’s Eve of 2024, as we head into the following year making the same promises to ourselves, the same resolutions, how do we actually achieve them?

For my experience in my own life and with working with clients, it really starts by selecting and visualizing your goal, which we’ve done. We have this goal, this resolution, this New Year’s excitement, but oftentimes we have a goal that’s very large or very nebulous. As we start the New Year, I encourage you to just dive into that goal that you have for yourself a little bit further. We could use the example of, I want to get pregnant, I want to repair my fertility, I want to balance my hormones because I want to get pregnant. I want 2024 to be the year that I finally have a baby. This is a really good goal, it’s one of those vague goals. What does that mean? What needs to happen? In the terms of PCOS, do you know your root cause? Do you know how to repair your fertility based on that root cause? That’s where the goals come in, these little mini goals along the way. In getting specific, we need to look at what specific lifestyle changes, habits, adjustments, things like that do we need to create in order to optimize fertility, in order to increase our chances of attaining this desire that we have of becoming a mom in 2024 or growing our family in 2024?

When we realistically realize and create a map of what needs to happen in order to reach that goal, then we know what habits we need to create. Ideally, this is the next recommendation, so then step two is going to be drip those habits out. Maybe you have a list of 5, 10, 20 habits that you need to begin incorporating into your life. Please don’t incorporate them all at once. Please, friend, please, please hear me when I say, start slow and steady and build a foundation. One, maybe two, but ideally one habit at a time. I would rather you take one habit at a time and add in habit number two, three, and four sooner rather than try to do two habits at a time. Life is busy. We’re set in our ways, we’re in our groove, we have our routine. Even if it doesn’t feel like a routine, even if it feels like chaos, we have our chaotic routine. In some ways or another, we know how we currently function, and changing it up by changing our habits creates a new level of chaos. It creates an unstableness for a while, and so we need to restabilize our new found habit, really like you are creating a foundation and then you can do it again with the next habit, again with the next habit until you’ve incorporated all the habits that you need to achieve the health goals that you want.

The next, the third and really, really, really important step that I think most people skip over is tracking for the purpose of inspiration. This is a long haul, this is not something that happens over a weekend or two weeks or even a month. When we are healing our PCOS hormones and when we are slowly integrating these new habits and making these lifestyle adjustments, it can take a long time and in our current culture and as humans in general, we tend to be instant gratification creatures, and we don’t want to wait three months for results and if we get to three months and we look back, we actually have a hard time seeing where we’ve come from and so it feels like we haven’t made a lot of progress but if we track, if we track by pictures, if we track by journaling and how we felt, what our symptoms were, just track where we’re at to where we are. A picture is a really quick and easy one. Just snap a picture on your phone, maybe write yourself a text or write yourself a note of how you’re feeling and the good and the bad of a certain day, and then track that over time. Whatever it is that you’re wanting to improve, find some way of tracking it like that, track even like, Okay, this is what I ate, and then you’re looking at what you eat now and you’re like, Oh, my goodness, I have made crazy progress in how I’m feeding myself and being able to see that progress is enormous because there’s the results of the progress, like maybe losing some weight or your periods becoming regular, seeing ovulation return, maybe you’re trying to lose weight and so you’re seeing that your pants are fitting better, maybe the scale has gone down a little bit, but when you see the pictures of yourself, you’re really amazed at… Actually, I am seeing difference, even though from the day to day you don’t feel a lot different. Being able to track that is one of the biggest ways to continually inspire and motivate yourself, because when you see that progress, all of a sudden you’re like, and I want more of that and so it’s one of the best ways to keep yourself motivated. It’s also one of the ways to check in with yourself and be like, I feel like I’m doing it. When I look at the pictures, I’m like, I’m not putting the effort in that I need to. So it can work both ways. It can be like, you know what? I need to really dig into this because I’m halfway putting myself into this and it’s not getting me where I want to go, so I need to put more effort in.

So step four would be to mix things up a bit, adjust your focus, grow into new healthy habits. The way I do this in my life is I have monthly focuses. We get bored. If you’re constantly just being like, this is my routine and I go and do it, I change up my focus a little bit every month, some months I’m really focusing on my hydration, some months I’m really focusing on my fitness, some months I’m really focusing on my nutrition, it doesn’t mean I stop the others because those are all habits that I have built into my foundation of my health and so these are all habits that I continue but where do I put my focus? Am I focusing on finding new ways of cooking healthy in the kitchen? Or am I finding new ways of incorporating better, stronger, longer workouts and movement in my day? Where is my focus on the month? and so I tend to create almost these little mini challenges for myself. This is my goal for this month, this is my focus. It can be over 30 days, it can be over two weeks, I tend to do 30 days because it all goes pretty fast and so I just recheck in with myself and I’m like, How did last month go? Where did I feel like I was succeeding? Where did I feel like I needed more effort? and I just give myself a new challenge, a new like, this is my focus. This is my primary goal, even now that most of my health habits are in place and so I encourage you to do the same, where instead of just being on this drudgery track, like that you spice it up, you keep it interesting, you change your focus a little bit while maintaining the progress and the habits that you’ve incorporated. It’s not like you’re jumping from one thing to the next, it’s that you’re bringing those things on, you’re solidifying them in your foundation of core habits, but you’re also allowing yourself to have some flexibility in adjusting your focus into different areas from month to month.

Then finally, as we wrap up how to stay motivated, it’s important to remember that this is not just a long list of shoulds. These are things that you’re incorporating in because you like them, you want them, you want the results from them and so it’s always about approaching it with curiosity and interest and finding a way where it works for you. If movement didn’t go well for you last month, what was it that didn’t go well? What do you need to change? What part would make it better for you? Because finally, no one is motivated all the time, and that’s okay. What we really need is to create those habits so we have the discipline so that they happen and then in our free time when we can, like I said, we spice it up, we change it up, we figure out what’s working, what’s not working, and we adjust it but even while something isn’t our favorite, we’re still showing up and doing the things so that we’re having forward progress so that we can continue to motivate ourselves through the inspiration of what we’re tracking, of what we’re seeing ourselves be able to accomplish because while we’re committed to these habits that you are slowly adding into your daily routine, the motivation will come and go and that’s okay. There’ll be some backsliding, there’ll be some interruptions in your progress but ultimately, because you are creating these habits, you are creating a healthy lifestyle, one that you like because you’re making them your own, you’re not just following somebody else’s cookie-cutter method, and you actually are enjoying the process, you’re enjoying seeing the results that you’re creating, tracking your progress, and actually want to continue following this plan that you have set for yourself and so when your alarm goes off, sure, you may not want to get out of bed right then, but you’re enjoying the journey, and so you do, because you know that few minutes of pain of actually pulling yourself out of bed is totally worth it and how proud and good you’re going to feel once you do and so it’s all builds on itself, one thing after another after another.

As we start this new year, I would love to hear from you over on Instagram, in my DMs, what is your first habit that you are going to work on in the new year? Not a resolution. You can tell me what is it that your goal for the year is, but how are you going to break that down into one starting habit? You can have a list of 5, 10, 20 that you’re going to ultimately get to, but what is the one that you’re going to start with? I would love to hear about that from you in my DMs over on Instagram. You can find me @Nourishedtohealthy. And until next time, bye for now.

Did you know that studies of PCOS epigenetics have shown that our environment can either worsen or completely reverse 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.