Everyone knows that it’s important to get a good night’s sleep, and to eat right if you want to feel healthy and energised every day. Let me start by saying that knowing this means absolutely diddly-squat. Seriously, it means nothing. I have known this for years, and it’s only in the past 14 months or so that I started to actually do something about it. And the key to doing something about it? You guessed it – a little at a time, never giving up.

Knowledge isn’t always power. Going after what you want – to be your own superhero and have a fantastic, positive life – now THAT is power!

This time last year – pre-veganism, pre-positive living, pre-actually-enjoying-life – I decided that the way to lose weight in January was through Slim Fast. You replace 2 of your meals a day with one of their milkshakes, and are allowed 2 of their prescribed ‘snacks’. You have a ‘healthy, balanced’ evening meal.

Did I know that, actually, replacing my meals with milkshakes wasn’t going to work in the long term? Yes. Did I know that what I really needed to make a change to an all-round healthier lifestyle? Of course! Did I actually do those things? Uh, no, actually.

It took another 4 months for me to make the change to veganism. I started running and playing Roller Derby for exercise in August, but it’s taken me until the past month to really go for it and try to kick butt with exercise. It took me that long just to realise I could really, actually do it!

Sleep is the same. I know that I’m a person who needs a lot of sleep. The days I feel best are the days when I have had 8 hours or more a night. Anything less than that and, even if my body itself doesn’t feel sluggish, my brain is and my eyes stay tired. Do I do anything about this? Well, I’m trying to currently, but for years the answer was no.

I’m going to start off with sleeping because, let’s face it, it’s easily the less intimidating of these two topics!

When we’re born, it’s simple. When we’re tired, we sleep. When we’re rested, we wake up again. Seriously, it doesn’t get simpler than that. As we grow older, this changes.

There are 2 things I’m going to refer to that briefly need outlining:

The first is that our natural body clocks are governed by something called circadian rhythm. Basically our ‘circadian rhythm’ is the fancy, scientific way of saying ‘our body clock’, because that’s in essence what it is. It is a roughly 24-hour cycle that tells our bodies when we should be awake and when we should be asleep. It is influenced by the daylight, so in summer our bodies want to sleep less and in winter they want to sleep more.

The second is that scientific studies over the past few years support the view that when we sleep, we go through a series of 1.5hour ‘cycles’, and that we feel most rested if we wake up at the end of one of these complete cycles. So, if I went to bed at 10pm and woke up at 7am, I would have completed 7 full cycles and would wake up feeling more refreshed than if I forced myself awake mid-cycle, for example at 6.15am.

Knowing these things give us the tools to do something to make our sleep more effective, and to make it work for us and help us more in our daily lives. As with everything I say, we’re going to take this in little steps. There is absolutely no point in launching yourself head first into something only to give up in a couple of days because you did too much too quickly! Persistence, as always, is key here.

Let me briefly bring it back to the topic at hand – Staying Positive in the Face of Your Day Job! When we are well rested…

• …we feel more refreshed upon waking so that we start the day with a much more positive, upbeat attitude.
• …when we get to our day jobs, we can be more productive from the very start, get stuck into our positive tasks list and end up with a LOT of positive things to say about the day in our ‘What went well today?’ box!
• …we can go for our after-day-job exercise without having to drag ourselves around like it’s hell, because we’re more alert. The exercise will even boost the new energy we already have!
• …we’ll be more awake so maybe we can actually be bothered to cook something for dinner that involves some vegetables, rather than sticking something beige in the oven. Hurray!
• …we’ll feel positive after that, too, so we’ll spend our evening doing totally rad stuff that we actually enjoy!
• …we’ll go to bed happily, having had an awesome, productive and fun day. What could be better?!

As I always try to be honest with these things, I do struggle sometimes to follow my own advice with what I’m about to say, but I’m getting better and better at it as time goes on. When you’re really caught up in the evening’s activities it can be hard to tear yourself away because you need to get to sleep. But when I manage it – more and more often these days! – the difference is spectacular! I have never counted myself as a morning person. I was grouchy and irritable and snappy and generally horrible. Now, I’m the happiest, chirpiest person ever in the mornings! It’s taken my boyfriend quite a while to get used to the change – I think he started to wonder if I’d been replaced with a doppelganger!

So, try to follow your 1.5 hour cycles. If you have to be awake at 6.30am, you need to be asleep at around 11pm so that you get 6 complete cycles and don’t force yourself awake with an alarm half way through one. Simple, right?

Wrong. It sounds easy but it’s isn’t always the easiest thing to force yourself to sleep if you don’t feel tired, or to stop yourself from nodding off early on the sofa if you’re exhausted. But I try my best – that’s all I can do! Normally I’m in bed by 10pm and will wind down, read and chat to my boyfriend for an hour so that I am sound asleep by 11. This helps – the adult equivalent of a child’s bedtime routine! I’m tellin’ ya folks, there’s a reason kids have those.

Now onto the reason that I mentioned circadian rhythms earlier. I am one of those people who find it REALLY SUPER HARD to wake up when it’s dark in the mornings. There’s a reason a lot of us feel this way, and it’s simply because our bodies are naturally programmed to wake up at dawn and go to sleep at sunset. Modern life works against this, and in all honesty simply wouldn’t be possible if we did listen to it. So what can we do?

Well, I’m currently saving up for one of these. They’re called ‘natural sunrise alarm clocks’. Half an hour before you’ve set your alarm to wake you up they stimulate a natural sunrise by slowly and gently lighting up. It’s a powerful bulb so it really works – my dad’s had one for ages! So by the time your alarm goes off, your body will be ready to wake up because it thinks it’s daylight. Clever, huh?

But at the moment, I can’t afford one. The proper, medically certified ones are £60 just for the starter edition. So! What to do instead?

In the lamp beside my bed I have a bulb that takes a while to warm up to its full brightness (not nearly as long as 30 minutes, but still). If you’re anything like me (and if you’re not you probably won’t need this anyway!), you’ll snooze the alarm several times before you actually get up. The first time mine goes, I switch the light on. By the time I’m actually about to get up, my brain has adjusted and it’s so much easier! This method doesn’t work as well as the fancy clocks do of course, but if you’re not made of money then it’s a totally viable option while you’re saving up.

These two things combined have turned my hellish mornings into something much better, brighter and a much more positive start to the day – which of course just makes everything else run more smoothly!

It also means that I actually manage to get out of bed in time to have breakfast, which leads me on to eatage…

Om nom, yummy guava!

I take the same approach here as I do with everything else: little changes, made often, persist, persist, persist!

When I first made the change to veganism, a lifestyle most people see as synonymous with healthy living, the first thing I did was online research to find out what junk foods I could still eat. The answer was a lot!

Being vegan isn’t an automatic ticket to good health. I can still eat chocolate. I eat crisps. Chips (or fries to you dear Americans) are vegan. Ask a few questions and you can find out what take-away foods are vegan, such as some pizza place’s pizzas without the cheese. I ate a lot of processed carbohydrates, and although it was still healthier than my previous diet it wasn’t great.

Slowly, over the course of the past year, it has got better. I spent a long time stressing over not wanting to be ‘that vegan who eats too many healthy foods and is therefore a freak’, but in the end I had a total brainwave:

Healthy foods aren’t ‘uncool’. Healthy foods will make you feel better. Healthy foods will make you LIVE longer!

The better I eat, the more energy I have, which is the essence of this post, and I explained at the beginning how that’s super-useful in staying positive at your day job. I’m not going to bore you with stuff you’ve heard a million times before, but I will give you a few tiny tips to bring more vitality into your life.

• Make time for breakfast. I didn’t eat it for years, citing that I ‘wasn’t a breakfast person’. Now that I exercise, get enough sleep (most of the time) and wake up better, I already feel more alert first-thing in the day, and fuelling your brain and body is essential to give you that extra push!
• Don’t launch yourself in head first. If you do that you’re more likely to feel ‘deprived’ of your favourite unhealthy foods – rather than finding new favourite healthy ones! – and fail. Instead, aim to make one snack a day a portion of fruit – like, replace one bag of crisps with 2 satsumas and some grapes. After a while that’ll seem totally normal to you, so you can change the next snack, and so on.
• Make the simple switch to whole-grains. Buy brown rice and pasta instead of the white stuff – easy! Not only will you be less bloated and feel lighter and more energised, they’re good for your heart, too.
• Add extra veg. I used to make plain spaghetti bolognaise (with vegan soya mince!). Now, I bulk out the mince by making at least half of it out of chopped red and green bell peppers, onions and mushrooms. Suddenly it’s a whole helluva lot better for you, and at least 2 of your 5-a-day!
• If you’re having something where you can’t do the above, just whack some veg on your plate! Tonight, for example, I’m having a Mexican bean burger thing in a whole-wheat pita bread with tomato and lettuce, and a few oven-baked chips, and I’ll stick some steamed (or microwaved from frozen, which is just as good for you!) broccoli and cauliflower on the plate too. This will bulk up your meal so you’ll feel fuller, and is of course good for you (duh).
• Manage your portions. It was only when I started weighing stuff out that I realised what size a real portion is! Before that, most evenings I had effectively been eating for three, and that’s never good. Start changing to the proper portions (unless you have already, in which case, go you!) and you’ll be amazed how fast your body will adjust to it and how much better you’ll feel – especially if your portions are of the right things!
• This is most important of all. Try to learn to listen to your body. I’ll be writing more about this over the coming weeks, and it’s the most important lesson I have ever learnt. Eat slower, and when you are full, stop. It sounds easy but if you’re not used to it, it’s really not! After a while, you’ll even be able to detect what exactly it is that your body wants when it’s hungry (and no, I don’t mean crisps!). The book that changed my life is Susie Orbach’s Fat is a Feminist Issue, but if you prefer a less scary little (and a little less involved book!), Paul McKenna uses pretty much the same theory in his I Can Make You Thin. I really recommend the first one to start with, especially as ‘weight-loss’ isn’t it’s central goal – health is! And that’s the way we should all look at the world. Take it in chunks, it really is brilliant!

Eating right really just helps with everything else I’ve talked about so far in the series.

Think of it as giving you building blocks to have a brilliant life.

The next step in the series is the final one – STEP FIVE: Being Your Own Superhero. I hope that you won’t want to miss it!

Peace & Love,