May in Your Body
into the thick of it- may routine and diet
Now that April showers are behind us, May is a month of beauty and bloom. Here in the middle of spring, we’ve begun to clear out the stagnation of winter and thaw the cold, hard blockages. It’s a great time to set yourself up for success for the daylight and warmth of summer, so let’s get after it…
Lifestyle & Routine
The sun is rising earlier (and so are the birds)— here on the sunnier side of the year is a wonderful opportunity to get started with your day sooner and really seize that jawn. The first few moments after wake-up are prime time to set an intention and start on the right foot (even before you put your feet on the floor). Before you grab for your phone, try asking yourself this: “how do I want to feel about myself when I get into bed tonight?”
Because springtime is a time to thaw, clear, and cleanse from the dark, cold winter, little habits like oil puling or tongue scraping take very little commitment and aid in clearing the wastes that accumulate from your body’s nightly cleaning. If you’re really looking to dive in to a new habit, try neti pot (which helps with clearing allergens from the sinuses).
Good routine in the season of sun, growth, and light sets the stage for ample success in your days. not every moment (nor every day) will be high, positive, and progress— but finding 5 minutes in your morning to set the stage will support with stress response and resilience in the immediate moment, and health and flow in the long run.
Diet Staples
Temperatures are still volatile (especially in early may) and clearing and cleansing is still priority. but with summer right around the corner, some staple food stuffs for the month include those with dilating, cooling, and hydrating properties. What goes on inside of us reflects what’s going on around us and, while the body is adaptive, modifying your diet for the season supports your systems so your energy can be directed towards more prudent tasks.
Light and bitter greens like asparagus, brussel sprouts, or arugula are chok full of vitamins and minerals and offer a bitter taste to body tonify your insides skins and stimulate the peristalsis that keeps your wastes moving through your channels of elimination.
As the weather gets warmer, cooling foods like lime, cucumber, avocado will provide the nutrients our bodies need while keeping the system from over heating. In a nutshell, your liver processes all of the byproducts of digestion, filtering out waste before sending the good stuff into the blood stream. Because blood is “hot” (from an eastern perspective), late spring diet into summer should consist of cooler foods to keep your liver function more stable/less over-taxed.
Finally, as the heat kicks up, your body begins sweating and flushing that heat through your skin organ (like how that sounds? skin organ). We need electrolytes quite literally to exist properly, so berries, melons, pineapples (tropical fruits) are robust sources for hydrating sweetness.
What’s Next
The soon-to-arrive summer is the season for being social, being in the sun, and making plans. May is a fabulous month to not only plan vacations, but also to plan for rest and recovery. Sleep/rest/recovery time is important always but falls to the wayside when the outside is nice and it’s fun to go play. Chill, vibe, and live wholly my friends.
5 Simple Strategies to Elevate Your Approach to Behavior Change
Key Takeaways
Sustainable behavior change isn't about forcing yourself into perfection — it's about building systems that honor your humanity. This means having a clear vision, embracing flexibility, staying discerning, and making room for joy along the way. The journey isn't linear, but with the right mindset and tools, it can be deeply rewarding.
Set your intention clearly, but don't treat it like a straight line to success. Change is uncomfortable and often unpredictable.
Curate Your Inputs Like Your Life Depends On It (Because It Does). The internet offers limitless information — and misinformation. Be intentional about what you absorb and who benefits from your attention.
Growth doesn't have to be rigid or miserable. True transformation happens in the gray area , where curiosity meets discipline and joy meets structure. Fun isn't optional. It's what makes change sustainable.
Start With the End In Mind (And Have Exit Ramps)
“Beginning with the end in mind” is a central pillar in any behavior change process. You cannot begin fruitfully without first pulling at (and sequencing out) the threads of the finished product. That said, behavior change is uncomfortable and uncertain enough to make the process feel daunting and exhausting. Begin with the end in mind, but give yourself space and grace with exit ramps. The process of change will never be linear, and holding a gun to your own head won’t necessarily meet the expectations with true and sustainable change.
Exit ramps, on the highway of life, are relief stations. Hungry? Tired? Really have to pee? There is nothing like a rest stop to refuel and recharge on a long journey. As you begin with the end in mind, where are you incorporating exit ramps- planned or spontaneous- in order to keep the things the things and resist the inevitable fatigue of going nonstop?
Invest in Your Library
In this modern age of hyper-connectivity, you can get any information about anything to validate any belief. Anything (in excess) can be a toxin and anything (in moderation) can reduce harm. The internet provides a wealth of knowledge with low-to-no barriers to access. This is a good thing. The internet also provides an abundance of un-moderated content, heavily influenced and driven by earnings.
Use discretion when engaging in educational content, keep a critical eye on sources and the beneficiaries of your attention. Reading (and critical thought) are skills that can be developed just like any other. Develop those skills as if your life depend on it, because it does. Question everything, including yourself- your aims, your intentions, and your end-game goals- to ensure that the processes that you’re implementing are, in fact, set with your best outcomes in mind.
Embrace the Spectrum (Distinction Instead of Contradiction)
Cartesian duality assumes that opposites imply conflict. Like the great prophecy between Harry and Voldemort, neither can live while the other survives. If something is hot, than it must not be cold. There is nuance between the two and all-or-nothing thought processes tend to fail in some regard because they neglect that truth. While this-or-that can be exclusionary, this-and-that approaches are nurturing.
There will be moments along your behavior change journey that ask of you something slightly off to the left of what you’d set out to do. Diversions and accommodations are an inevitability of this process, use them as opposed to avoiding them. Find the space where “contradiction” and “distinction” meet to suit your needs best.
Gamify It
Fun is scientifically proven in improve outcomes, particularly in learning. Behavior change is a learning process, it is a process of skills development specified for behaviors. That’s it. As kids, we are cultivated in fun, playful environments. We get recess and activities that stoke curiosity, empower innovation, and lead to long lasting life lessons. Somewhere in life, we end up carrying the expectation of meeting standards, consumed otherwise by preparing to meet those standards. This is the byproduct of civilization, particularly on that is built on quantifiable validation. Big data aggregates, reduced into buckets of “either or”.
You are the master of your life. As such, fun cannot be fully taken from you. You look at your intended outcomes and explore creative ways to embark on that journey. You can do this by
Just Do It- For You (But What Does That Mean)
Lastly, and bigly, just do the thing. Every moment is a decision made whether we like it or not. You can either let the decisions happen, sans involvement, or you can actively engage where opportunity arises. There are the things we can and cannot control- as such, we should retain our power over the things we can control. The thing you can control is yourself. Your thoughts will happen, and mindfulness is the practice of engaging the response you have to the thoughts. Your words get spoken, and you can either speak without listening or you can hear yourself and speak impeccably. Actions require motivation, and you can have conscious awareness of those motivations through introspection and curiosity.
Your legacy is the result of your decisions made. Decisions should be made for your highest and best self given the tools and resources available to you at any given time. This approach can feel like one big platitude, but the bottom line is the simplest line. Start there. Take inventory of the choices you make that you know do not serve you. Take inventory of the choices you make intending to reduce harm and induce self care. Be honest with yourself, you cannot run from the mirror- at least not very far.
5 Simple Strategies to Elevate Your Movement Practice
Key Takeaways
Your body is built to move in patterns — and training those patterns with intention builds strength that actually translates to real life. By combining foundational movements, diverse planes of motion, and an understanding of how your body manages energy, you can train smarter, not harder.
Movement patterns like pushing, pulling, lunging, and walking mimic how we live, so include them all in your workouts.
Move in all directions; life doesn’t happen in a straight line; neither should your training.
Lifting well helps you sit, stand, carry, and recover with ease — it’s just practice for being human.
Foundations of Movement Patterns
There are somewhere between 5 and 7 fundamental movement patterns: gait, push, pull, anti/rotation, hip dominant, knee dominant, and lunge. An argument can be made that the latter three are really just variations of push or pull movements- a conversation for a different day. Our muscles and bones (and transitional tissues in between) are a series of pulleys and levers to make movement happen.
A full-body, valuable workout protocol incorporates all of these in some way. Some of them pair more nicely than others- for instance, a pull movement in the upper body pairs nicely with a pull movement in the lower body. That said, checking off the boxes is a level-one, solid start for any movement practice.
Planes of Motion
We move through 3 dimensions (though some of us might dive a bit deeper into the fourth): frontal, saggital, and transverse. The frontal plane is side-to-side movements, the saggital plane is front-and-back movements, and transverse is a lil bit of both*. Most all of us live most all of our time in the saggital plane. Loading weights, for sure, is most often moved through that plane of motion.
Incorporating the other two, especially integrating frontal plane movement, contributes to healthy, multidimensional joints. The transverse plane is an eventual byproduct of moving the full body, in a balanced way, through gravity’s constant pull.
*the transverse can be said to embody step one of an eventual thrust into the fourth dimension.
Practical Applications
We lift weights and stay strong so that we can perform best in our day-to-day life. I’ll say it over and over: movement, nutrition, and mindset are all just skills to be practiced. We continually arrive at deeper levels of nuance as we become more embodied and aware of our experiences. In life we sit and stand (knee dominant), we pick things up off the floor (hip dominant), we push a shopping cart, we pull a door open, we walk with a sleeping baby dangling off of us. All of these things are replicated in the gym setting, with the addition of load, in order to train and maintain the strength necessary to live with less injury.
Keep it simple! Over and Over, do the thing that looks like the things that you’re already doing and you’re likely to find that you end up doing the things in a way that feels a bit better every time.
Sleep: The Foundation of Health
For most of my life, sleep has been a nuisance. I yearned for all that I could accomplish in that time spent in slumber. As I’ve aged (and come to respect the value of 40 winks) my sleep quality has become a non-negotiable in my routine. That night time, melatonin-fueled semi-coma carries it’s weight in value for our lives. To avoid getting too in-the-weeds with the jargony bits of sleep science, consider this a high level understanding of all the systems invested in your good night’s sleep.
Digestive Health
You’ve heard it before, and you’ll hear it right here: your tummy is your brain’s brain. Our gut plays host to more microbes than the earth does humans. Each of our microbiomes is like a fingerprint, made up of a unique assortment of organisms specifically related to our current lifestyle and genetic factors. Digestion is a star player in the regularity of our circadian rhythms. As such, when our sleep is disturbed, our gut senses that and starts to make plans to adjust accordingly. Additionally, when
Our gut influences our sleep influences our guts in a lot of ways (see more here). Suffice it to say, though, that there are a few easy-peasy ways you can cultivate mindful habits that support sleep health through diet. These include:
Eating within the same time blocks throughout the day.
Avoiding eating within two hours before sleep time.
Following the 1-2-3 rule for fruits and (especially) veggies: 1 with breakfast, 2 with lunch, 3 with dinner.
Minimizing consumption of overly shelf-stable foods or highly processed, densely saturated foods.
Cognitive Function, Stress, and Regeneration
We need adequate sleep in order to replenish our brain stuffs after a day of being “things that think”. Our brains utilizes upwards of 20% of our energy resources to continue to conduct all of our bodily processes day-in and day-out. The byproducts of thinking get flushed out through the “glymphatic system” (the lymph of the central nervous system). This is an incredible feature and a high value mechanism that sleep enacts. Life without proper sleep is a lot like continuing to drive your car without an oil change. Its inefficient and sludges up the engine, rendering the vehicle a risk. Speaking of vehicles, scientists have studied the effects of poor (or no) sleep on cognition and have equated sleepless driving to driving while under the influence.
When we are stressed, though, our relationship with sleep gets even more complex. For instance, the stress hormone, cortisol, mobilizes stored glucose into the circulatory system to provide working muscles more readily available energy resources. If you’re into this shit, you’re into it and already know it. If you’re not into it, or you’re not interested in knowing more about it, don’t worry. Again, the bottom line is that sleep is intended to be a regenerative moment for our bodies to process out it’s waste. The efficacy of those processes is dependent on our circumstances. Because we exist in a hyper-active, hyper-productive world, that’s not always easy. When push comes to shove, if sleep is becoming a problem due to stress, there are a few measures we can take before calling our primary. These include:
Having a bed time routine. We are not immune to Pavlovian response. Put a few key actions into sequence to trigger your brain into “power down” mode.
Reduce or eliminate blue light after 8pm. Blue light stimulates receptors in the eyes to produce more cortisol.
Be observant of the effects that fluctuations on your emotions have on your relationship with sleep. Anxiety begets anxiety, how can you notice those feelings arise without feeding their flames?
The Short of It
We are not exempt from the natural law. Without adequate, quality regenerative time, our bodies run on fumes eventually breaking down from lack of resources. Prioritize that rest time, lean into feeling recovered, and live better for it!
Op/Ed: Make a Choice- On Purpose
You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make the horse drink. You can give your dog some cheese, point right to it, and they’ll still go sniffing in all the wrong places. Change psychology, particularly in this ultra-informed population, has begun to feel outdated at best, jaded at worst. These musings come from my years of struggling through (and eventually recovering from) these same afflictions.
Each day I am presented with various forms of “I saw a TikTok that said X, so I thought I would give it a try”, “I know what I need to do to make meaningful change, I just haven’t yet”, and the famous “I can change at anytime, I’d just prefer that the variables be perfectly aligned with my expectations before doing that”. It feels a lot like talking to a wall.
How do we reconcile that pursuing our dreams feels at odds with caring for ourselves in the present? Have we lost touch completely with our intuition, or whatever it is that guides us towards our goals? Or, is it that our ego has commandeered our inner compass, insatiable unless met with unbound success? As always, more questions than answers.
I recently sat with a line from the book “Inner Excellence” by Jim Murphy that read “The Ego is obsessed with outcomes” and, man, did that hit. As I’ve sought to unravel these blockages in my life decisions, this sentiment is echoed through the hallways of my past. Ego as a concept has historically been tough for me to understand.
At it’s base, Ego is the internalization of the performance that we put on daily. That performance is determined by the lives that we’ve lived, the interactions we’ve had. The narratives we’ve curated about our past unfold in the present and influence the outcomes of our future. We are the cruise directors on our life’s journey, and the Ego infiltrates our passage through protective mechanisms based on our past. At some point, the ego hijacks our inner guide and we lose the creative power of multitudes in pursuit of the singular endgame.
All this to say that we can lead ourselves to water, we can take ourselves right to the door of satisfaction and, instead, turn just to the left, choosing to look out the window and get so lost in the view that we neglect to actually get outside. Knowledge is power, and turning into the shadows can elucidate more tools for the fight- so, while answers may not fully materialize, contemplation is a gift! Keep searching, experimenting, and adjusting to meet the moment. That, I think, is the greatest joy of life.