Episode 24 – ADHD Specifity and Time – Week 2 of the 8 Week Nudge Series

It’s week two! Did you guys do the work from last week?! How did it go?

This week I wanted to discuss a couple of the hurdles that can stall us out or prevent us from taking that initial action to get going. I won’t recap it here…just click play above and you can hear all about specificity and time!

My Work

First of all, I’ll do a quick recap of my work. My ideal vision of myself is leaner, weighs less, and has tons of energy. My daily 30 minute nudges are to exercise and to meal plan. 15-20 minutes on the exercise, 10-15 minutes on the meal planning.

Here’s my update. I have definitely lost weight. I think I lost more than would be considered a healthy number. I was hoping to achieve maybe one pound per week. This week it was closer to 6 pounds! Most likely it was all that initial beer and bread weight. I drank zero beers this last week so perhaps that has something to do with it. I’m not expecting that to continue.

The first few days that I did the exercising were pretty half-assed. I maybe worked out for 15 minutes. I would set my timer for 15 minutes and I worked out with my resistance bands. My point wasn’t to “get a kick ass workout in”, it was to “do the thing I said I was going to do.” This process is one that builds momentum over time. So beating myself for a shitty, weak-sauce workout isn’t part of that plan.

The result is that even though the first few days of working out weren’t amazing, I still felt more energized when I was done. I still felt stronger.

And by Thursday, I was adding a walk into the mix. I live in an apartment complex with community laundry. When I run a load, it has a timer for 36 minutes. So one day I loaded up the wash, and went for a 36 minute walk. True to form, I sent an 18 minute timer and started walking “away”. And when the timer went off, I walked back! Another victory was that I found my new place to walk! There’s a park that is about a 15 minute walk from my apartment. And the houses around that park are nice, so it’s a fun place to walk and explore.

The real insight and victory has come with the daily meal planning. Just by sitting down and making a decision about the food I’m going to eat in the upcoming meals, it completely changes the dynamic of my food choices. As I mentioned in the podcast, the food decisions I make in the moment are less about “do I want to eat that tasty donut or not” and they have been reframed as “do I want to shit on my meal plan?” Makes the decision so much easier!

Next Week

Through the next week I will be continuing to dedicate my 30 minutes towards exercise and meal planning. I have found that when I go on a walk, I desire to go on a longer walk than 15-20 minutes, so on days when my exercise is walking instead of resistance bands, it will most likely be a 30-45 minute walk. In this podcast episode, I mentioned that as time goes on we won’t have to force ourselves to put in more time, we will actually choose to do it. This is a perfect example of that. I also am finding that the meal planning takes less than 5 minutes to do! So I don’t have to allot as much time for it.

What are you working on this week? If you have any questions or concerns about this process, please don’t hesitate to reach out using the contact tab on the website!

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