Be Unstoppable!

Let's talk about building a routine. 


Routines are going to become your biggest ally in graduate school. None more so than routines to complete the simple, non-school related tasks like working out, waking up, doing laundry, cooking, cleaning, dishes, grocery shopping, etc.  For example, Sunday has become my day to many of these everyday tasks, as can be seen in the example routines below.  

Thus I have developed a schedule that I stick by somewhat rigidly. Though, I of course am human and sometimes this varies, this is generally what my day looks like.


Daily Routine:

6:00-6:15 - Wake up, change into my workout gear, and drink a really big glass of cold water
6:15-6:45 - Workout
**I'm going to write a post about the benefits of morning workouts, but pretty much want I want to emphasize here that if your reason for not getting your workout in is that you're too burned out in the evening to get it done, then WORKOUT IN THE MORNING! That way it's done, it's over with and you can just veg or go to happy hour in the evening**
6:45-6:55 - Shower
7-7:45 - Get READY!! Get dressed, brush my teeth, do my hair, etc. Pack my lunch for the day and make and drink my SHAKEOLOGY
7:45-8ish - Walk to work and listen to a Personal development podcast
8 - 4:30ish - Lab/Class 
The first 30 minutes of my day tend to be the planning part of my day. I write up my to-do lists and check my emails, spending a small amount of time on facebook to check in with my customers, etc.  I then spend the first couple hours of the day before the majority of my lab gets in reading papers or anything else that involves a significant amount of focus.  Then I'll start my experiments for the day
I tend to to have a mid-morning snack at approximately 10-10:30. Lunch tends to be between 12-1. I also tend to have a my mid-afternoon snack at around 3pm.  
**The time I leave work does vary depending upon the amount of work I have or the amount of class I had during the day. When I leave can vary anywhere from 4:30 to 6pm and I thus have to adjust my schedule accordingly.**
5:00 - Walk home
5-6:30 - Dinner and Relaxation, with a little bit of Beachbody work. I'll often watch the News while I eat dinner and then afterward do a little Beachbody work
6:30-10 - Academic Reading and/or Studying (ie. Papers for lab, background reading, catching up on recent publications, studying or writing for class)
10-10:30- Personal Development Reading OR Journaling
10:30 - Bedtime!
Like I said, not only do I have a general daily routine, I also have a weekly routine! Again, this is very general, but this is just an example.


Weekly Routine:

M-F: AM Workouts and Daily Work
Saturday: AM Workout, Grocery Shopping, and Studying. Occasionally I will go into lab on Saturday.
Sunday: Meal Prep, Doing Laundry, Cleaning, Etc., and MORE Studying!

Everybody deserves a night off in graduate school, and I diligently take Friday night off. Whether I'm out with friends or just enjoying a night in, I always give myself this night off. No studying. No working. Just relaxation and enjoyment! This is my ME time! My relaxation! Make sure you take some time for yourself!

I hope that helps to give you an idea of the kind of routine you set up for yourself!



Until next time,




Other useful sources:
Elliott Hulse - "Discipline is greater than Motivation" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMnMp-d5pKs&nomobile=1
 Today I want to emphasize the The Importance of Meal Prep! If you want to maintain and promote your own healthy lifestyle, you MUST prepare yourself in every way possible!

My Beachbody coach loves to say all the time....

FAIL TO PREPARE AND YOU PREPARE TO FAIL!

 Of course, this is super applicable to life, but my favorite way to apply that statement is to your nutrition! So today, I want to focus on meal prep! Last Sunday and again this weekend, I will be doing some serious meal prep, because it's just the ONLY way to really guarantee myself success in my nutrition by making all my snacks, meals, etc. accessible, easy, and a of course healthy! This is especially true when I'm doing 21 day fix! If you're going to be successful on this program - you NEED TO PLAN AHEAD!!!

 So here's an idea of what my meal prep looks like!

Saturday - Recipe selection and grocery shopping. I will usually go on pinterest or online and hunt for recipes, OR I will go to my already absurd amount of collected recipes and choose from some of my favorites, like Paleo Phad Thai and these other 21 Day Fix Approved options.
Sunday - MEAL PREP DAY! Last weekend was a great example! Instead of vegging out all day watching football, which is how I wanted to spend my Sunday, I multi-tasked! I put football on in the background and got all my meal prepping and house work done in the meantime!

 But now you might be asking - okay I understand planning ahead but what exactly do you do to prepare yourself?

 Basically - I prepare absolutely everything I can ahead of time! So, first things first, I CHOP EVERYTHING UP!!!!

 One of the ways I get my greens in during 21 day fix is by eating cucumbers (which I LOVE) and celery with hummus as snacks!  So, to make it as easy as possible for me to do this (which after all is the point of meal-prepping), I chop and bag EVERYTHING ahead of time!  I cut cucumbers up and celery up into small pieces and measure them out using the 21 day fix green container. Once I fill the green container, I dumb those pre-cut, pre-portioned cucumbers or celery into a ziploc bag and continue until I have cut up all the celery and cucumbers! What I'm left with is a tupperware full of pre-portioned, ready snacks that I can just GRAB in the morning to take with me to work.

This same strategy is used in my preparation of my fruit and greens! For example here, I had a cantaloupe that I wanted to use for my 21 day fix purples! So I chopped it up and kept it ready in a tupperware for the week! I could have pre-portioned these out just like I did for the cucumbers/celery but I ran out of ziploc bags! So, I just left these in the larger tupperware and filled a purple 21 day fix container before I left to go to work in the morning.

For my greens, I love to have a salad for lunch! I get creative with my salads! Kale with sweet potato and hard boiled egg/chicken with a lemon olive oil dressing, kale with grapes and almonds and lemon olive oil vinaigrette or balsamic vinegar or lemon! Yum! But the biggest reason I can do that is there's no need for me to rip up greens in the morning because I've already done that on Sunday! I rip up and throw all of my kale into a very larger tupperware container! I then throw a larger handful into a tupperware for lunch that day and top it with whatever ingredients I'm feeling for that days salads!

 I also prepare all my protein ahead of time! I hard boil all my eggs (as shown below) and cook all my protein! This week it was chicken! I cooked about a pound and a half of chicken breast tenders (which I love because about 2 of them are equivalent to one 21 day fix red container), which I seasoned with whatever seasoning I was feeling that day! Coffee BBQ seasoning, cajun, italian seasonings, etc. It kind of depends on what I'm going to put the chicken in that week! This week was taco salads and taco bowls, so I seasoning them with a chili powder, Mexican blend!  That way your protein is ready to just throw into your meal or eat as a snack, with NO PREP NEEDED!!!

 Also not pictured - I prepped and baked sweet potatoes as one of my starches for the week and also soaked and cooked a bunch of beans as my other starch, both of which I threw onto salads or into taco bowls during the week!

And that's it! It was a tedious task, but you know what? If you take a couple hours on a Sunday morning/afternoon while you're watching football or doing house chores, etc. you will save yourself SO MUCH TIME during the week and make eating health SO MUCH EASIER!!

 I highly recommend meal prepping and I hope that some of these tips helped you with your own meal prepping adventures!!!

Until next time, stay healthy my busy friends! ;-)



**For UPDATED Life Handbook post CLICK HERE!**

Life Handbook
The Life Handbook - from PE.  Photo credit to Personal Excellence
I stumbled across a blog post about a year and a half ago about a life handbook. I found myself on a bit of a spiritual/personal development journey and looking for something really pivotal out of life, and I thought that this was a publication of life hacks, adages, etc.  But, it actually turned out better than than that.

Introducing the Life Handbook (LH).

Now before I go any further in describing this, I want to make sure I tell you that credit for this idea is entirely due to Celestina Chua. Check out her blog/website/description at the link below.
http://personalexcellence.co/blog/create-your-life-handbook/

The LH is an accessory that sort of developed out of PE's program, 30 Days to Live a Better Life (or 30DLBL).  If you have the time and the inclination, I highly recommend you partake in this program.

If you don't have time to read her whole post - let me break it down for you.  An LH contains anything and everything pertaining to your life.  Everything you've ever been inspired by, yearned for, wanted to achieve, wanted to remember, needed to say, etc.  It literally can encompass any and every aspect of your life.That's the overall point of an LH.

Now, let's talk about format.  The LH is exactly as it sounds - a book. I found that as much as I liked the idea of having a book, it wasn't practical to carry around an additional book.  We've discussed - I'm in graduate school! My backpack is full of enough other crap! :-)  So, I have found that the soft copy format works best for me.  If you're up in the air, I would start with the soft copy version. You can always transition later to an actual hard copy book, if you'd like. If you want to do a soft copy, you could use any program that works most feasibly for you - Excel, Powerpoint, Word, etc. I love One Note for this.  As someone who really liked the format of a hard copy, but didn't find it feasible, One Note is a good intermediate. It is formatted very much like a notebook, but with the convenience of a soft copy.  I have Outline+ on my ipad (to be discussed in a future post about best apps for graduate school!!), and Outline 2013 on my laptop. I save my life handbook to Dropbox (best apps for grad school!!), and am able to access it seamlessly between my ipad, which I have with me all day, and my laptop when I get home in the evening.

Now, it took me a while to format my life handbook and to really fill it with applicable content that fit my life and my goals.  I've broken my LH into some rather unconventional section, at least by the standard of what was original described by PE.  These sections are broken up as follows:

Just Me
By far the most comprehensive and personal section of my LH.  This section contains the following, each as its own individual section to allow for future editing, and some of which are sections that I created without the guidance of PE...
Mission Statement
My Values
Ideal Life
Vision Board
Character Board
Role Models
My Ten Commandments
20 Things
Strengths
Weaknesses
Bucket List (& of course a subsection of completed bucket list items)

Extraordinary Life
This section contains all things pertaining to my goals, plans, etc.  Such things include a Life Map of 1, 3, and 5 year goals, as well as 10 year goals.  Also, I have plans of action for some of my more specific and continuous goals, each with fun little names pertaining to the goal - these include my career/education goals, "LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE" (my personal goals), my fitness and health goals, and my financial goals ("Operation Financial Stability").

Who needs talking...
My wonderful iPad set up and how I stay up to date on my LH
I'm a big writer. I love journaling, writing poetry, and songwriting as an emotional release. As such, I find that I'm very comfortable alone, in silence, sitting with my thoughts.  Hence the name of this section. It includes all of the aspects of my LH that are meant to be reflective.  I have a journaling section (yes - I'm finally transitioning to going paperless), which is dedicated to the sorts of reflections that are done out of necessity - when I'm having a bad day and need to vent, or release all sorts of negative emotions. This is the section that isn't meant to have a positive resolution.  Let's face it - sometimes you don't want things resolved. You just want to vent about them.  The other part of this section is the Self-Reflection section.  Self-reflection, as demonstrated in 30 Days to Live a Better Life, is an absolutely crucial part of bettering yourself. If you don't reflect on what you did and what you did wrong, or could improve on, how will you ever know your strengths and weaknesses?  This is probably the most extensive portion of my LH.

Lastly, there's the Pick Me Up section.
Just like it sounds, this section contains my inspiration - quotes, images, poetry - motivation, songwriting, life adages, and workout motivation.  This is the section I go to when I need a pick me up.  The poem "Invictus", which I shared with you in a previous post is at the very top of my inspiration, along with quotes from Steve Jobs, the Dalai Lama, and Panache Desai.  Anything that makes you feel good goes in this section, for me.

So, that's my life handbook!  It's constantly changing!  That's what's so amazing about it, because it is such a true reflection of your life and what you want! Make it your own! Personalize it to no end! It is you in a compiled document, so do what you will with it!

If you want more information, I encourage you to check out Personal Excellence, specifically her post on the life handbook!

Let me know, and definitely let Celes know what you think and how you formatted your life handbook! She would love it!  A truly great person!  Follow her on facebook as well! She's a great resource and is constantly posting inspiring quotes and stories!

Until next time!


An interesting graph I found on a fellow blogger's page (Healthy Living For You Blog), which she found on this page.  I had to give credit where credit was due!  These graphs demonstrate the types of study techniques that work for both your initial learning and your maximum retention!

I've got quite a few tests coming up in the near future, the first being Immunology on the 7th. Once I've taken these first couple grad school exams, I'm going to start posting study tips and note taking strategies.  I've got to prove that they work in grad school since I've changed some of my habits since undergrad!

Until then, keeping working hard!  I've been getting a little burned out myself lately. Took a 3 hr nap when I got home today, and went for a walk instead of a hard workout, because I literally hurt everywhere after my double header soccer games last night. Even my shoulder hurts, which is a weird one for me, and I may or may not have residual effects from a possible concussion that I may have sustained last night after taking a couple blows to the head during game 1! Ahh!  Again, let's just refer back to my other post about listening to your body.

Until next time!

I'm very excited to announce that my blog has moved!

You will be automatically redirected to the new address.

If that does not occur, please visit https://thefitnerd.squarespace.com/'.