 If you're anything like me, you tend to relax a little bit during the holiday season between Thanksgiving and New Year's. From Christmas cookies to holiday cocktails to chocolate and stuffing your face with stuffing and green bean casserole, I just freaking love it. It can kind of feel like we've gone a little bit backwards since the holiday season started. So in this video, I'm going to give you a few tips and tricks to get back on track and to accumulate some habits so they actually stick with you until maybe next holiday season. If you're new here, I'm Sarah and this is Monkey. And I help teach people how to find inner happiness through fitness and spirituality. And today, we're going to get you healthy, happy and loving life. Okay, so the first thing is I don't want you guys to beat yourself up for a little bit of weight or you might have a little extra fluff on it this time. The more that you focus and stress about it, the more difficult it's going to be to get back on track because you're going to be so laser focused on it that you won't notice the subtle changes that are happening. Instead, I want you to be so grateful for the memories that you made for the experiences you got to have with your friends, your family, loved ones, co-workers. Look, I've gone through this cycle now for like nine or 10 years and the thing is there's a balance and you have to learn to enjoy and let loose and enjoy the time you have in the holidays and enjoy the good food and just know that like it's going to happen and like you can snap back from it and you'll get right back on track as long as you don't dwell in that after the new year starts. I'm just telling you from experience so just look forward, look at the things you can change in the new year, appreciate the memories and the times you had, the good food, the chocolate, you might eat so much chocolate and here we go. So here's the thing, like you don't want to just change your physical fitness or nutrition but you want to look at kind of like where your mind is at as well and your mindset as well. Those five to six weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year's can often feel so hectic where like we sometimes forget like what freaking day of the week it is especially between Christmas and New Year's and the thing is a lot of us get off of our normal routine so even besides the drinking or the extra food or the sugar or whatever that you're consuming you tend to kind of fall away from the normal routine things you're doing maybe you're out of town visiting friends or family or whatever and the new year is a time to just like rejuvenate yourself get back on track so hi so what I want you to do is take out your phone or take out a piece of paper and I want you to write down six things that you either want to get back to doing that you want to improve on or that you want to newly incorporate into your life or your routine so I'm gonna say here I'm actually gonna give you my six you can use some of them you can use your own it really depends on what your goals are and what you're looking to do now a lot of times in this part people will put down something about working out or going to the gym or doing yoga or dance or whatever it is that you enjoy doing I don't put that in this section because even during the holidays it has become such a habit for me to go to the gym that like I don't really stop going to the gym during the holidays but a lot of people do so if you normally go to the gym and you want to add something like that back in or if you want to newly start going working out or maybe working at home or whatever I would definitely suggest that you know putting something on your list where you're at least moving first one that I do immediately is cut out all alcohol so I'm not really a big drinker to begin with but I do love some holiday cocktails I'm not gonna get into how unhealthy alcohol is for you it's literally straight poison for your body but I do tend to drink more during the holidays than I do at any other point of the year and even this past year in 2021 and I did drink a little more than I usually do so I just like cut that straight out and like I will for a few months the next thing I do is completely cut out sugar I kind of do those simultaneously but for this instance we're gonna write down six things and we're gonna go through six weeks so I cut out sugar cutting out alcohol and then adding back in water I'm usually really good about drinking a lot of water but during the holidays it just kind of it just wasn't my focus it just wasn't something I was really like focused on and what I do is at least 100 ounces a day so those are three nutritional things right off the bat that I do right after the holidays and then there's three things I kind of fell away from while I was it was more so like in between Christmas and New Years because both of my roommates ended up having COVID so I stayed at my parent's house for like 10 or 11 days so I was just like really off my routine so getting back to regular journaling getting back to dream journaling which I kind of had stopped when I went there and the last thing is my nightly skin routine for whatever reason a lot of times when I go out of town or I go to my parents house or whatever like I don't bring I don't bring all of my nightly skin routine so those are my six things that I want to reincorporate and get back into my life starting in this new year so let me know below like what are some of the things that you're going to add back in do you need some ideas like we can definitely talk about it in the comments below and if you need some help like coming up with there is just drop it down below we'll talk about it and we'll figure them out for you and then what we're going to do with these six things is compound them over top one of another through the next six weeks which will take you right into the beginning of March that's the whole goal here is like the first two months or so like we're already you know what two weeks into the new year that we're gonna take this right into March and the whole point of focusing on one thing at a time is that oftentimes if we try to jump into doing too much at once we get so overwhelmed we just don't do it all I mean have you guys ever been there I'm sure you have I definitely have for example if you have never worked out in the gym and you all since a I'm gonna go work out seven days a week you're not probably gonna do that like an example for me is like as you guys heard my last video I started doing yoga now from someone that had never done yoga but well I hadn't passed but like who wasn't consistently doing yoga I was gonna go say oh I'm gonna do yoga seven days a week I'm gonna do it every day but I knew that just doing it once a week was it going to be pushing myself so I chose to make a goal of doing it every other day which I pretty much stuck to so the whole point is like you want to find a personal balance for yourself that's pushing you and making you step out of your comfort zone but also giving yourself enough love and grace and acceptance so it's kind of tough but you have to just know what's right for you like I knew going into yoga seven days a week was too much and I wouldn't do it I wasn't gonna do it but I knew that once a week like wasn't pushing myself necessarily so I found a balance that worked for me and it hit a goal like for me and I hit it most the time so you just want to think about building more long-term habits and if you jump into doing all these different things at one time it's more likely that you're not going to stick to them long-term so pick six things and you want to focus on one thing each week so say if you're looking at mine for example the first week I'm cutting out alcohol and then maybe the second week I add in sugar so I'm cutting out sugar and cutting out alcohol and maybe the third week that's when I'm concentrating on water and you see you just want to accumulate those things on top of each other so that you're building those long-term habits and also getting back on track from the holidays and from kind of slack in the last few weeks and the thing is is that the more you create habits the easier they are to kind of just like snap back to so because I've been doing this for so many years I'll be able to do this all within maybe 10 days two weeks whereas if this is your first time doing something like this I want you to take it slow and I want you to do it week by week and just concentrate on that one thing on hitting that goal okay if you're not going to eat sugar and like you love sugar I'm like oh I do just like don't even have a Hershey kiss okay like take it day by day if you're quitting alcohol but you love to drink if you're quitting cigarettes or vaping or nicotine just take it day by day and add in a new goal each week and if you need to spread it out do it every other week if you want to concentrate on one thing every two weeks do whatever works for you and that you believe will give you long lasting life-changing sustainable habits and the thing is I want you to do this with with change in mind with the journey in mind and not the end result because here's the thing if you're only looking for the result at the end of whatever it is that you're doing you're not actually looking to make a lasting change you're looking for a quick fix therefore you'll end up right back where you started so what you want to do is look at hey I'm excited to get on this journey of eating healthy again I'm excited to see what drinking a lot of water every day does for me I'm excited to get back to my dream journaling so I can start remembering my dreams again because as soon as I stopped doing that they started really slipping away and the second I start recording them again they'll come back so you want to think of it as a journey and not an end goal because then as soon as you hit that goal you'll stop doing the habit so just think of it more of a lifestyle change to get back on track to incorporate new things into your daily life that's going to just make you feel good and be happy and be that person that you want to be like who are you gonna be in 2022 establish those habits now okay do it now figure out write down all these goals what do you want to do and start taking steps towards them now I hope you guys enjoyed this video if you did don't forget to subscribe and like this video so others can see it too I love you so much and I can't wait to hang out with you again next week and don't forget be limitlessly yourself