Happy New Year! We are already 11 days into 2025, and feel like I finally have a minute to get a handle on my schedule and start focusing on myself. Self-care is my ultimate goal for 2025.

I bought myself an old-school paper planner to use to strategize the coming month, based on my cycle, and be a guide to follow for the upcoming weeks. My intention is to use this tool to help stay on track – from scheduling gym time, what to eat, weekly self-care, and other things I’ve deemed important to my self-care. It might seem silly to have to schedule self-care, but I tend to do better if I have things planned out – pen to paper – and know the time is carved out for that purpose. I spent a lot of last year (and previous years?) putting myself near the end of the line, and I can tell its taken a toll on my mental and physical health. Half of 2024 was spent grieving the loss of my brother Tony. Thankfully I had the support of my husband, my family, and friends, and I was able to appropriately process Tony’s death in a healthy way. Acknowledging grief head-on and feeling the feelings allowed me to get to where I am today. I felt stuck for a while, but the fog has lifted and am able to refocus on taking better care of myself. I owe it to myself in my brother’s memory.

The Plan:

I recently made the decision to start following Dr. Mindy Pelz’ Fast Like a Girl protocol where intermittent fasting is used in connection with your monthly cycle to help reset my body. I read her books and made notes on what to do and when, and I’m still learning about timing of different foods to consume, varying workouts based on cycle phase, and how to be more self-disciplined with some of my decisions. Another great book to help hack your monthly cycle is called In the Flo by Alisa Vitti. I love her advise regarding food choices, seed-cycling and hacking your workouts. Highly recommend.

I gave myself a few small jobs to tackle right away January 1st.

Job 1 : cut out the mindless evening snacking. Not going to lie, but the first few days were difficult. I realized it was more about breaking the snacking habit than anything else. Normally I would put the kids to bed and go right for the fridge or pantry to find something to snack on. I made it thru kids’ bedtime so I deserved a treat, right?! Rather than grabbing something to nibble, I found having a cup of tea was a better choice (bonus: it seems to appease my oral-fixation habit).

Job 2 : cut out sugary sweets. I somehow conditioned myself over the years that I needed (deserved?) a sugary sweet immediately after eating lunch. Another habit to break. Having a bit of flavored sparkling water helped take care of the need to overload on chocolate, cookies, or anything else. The other big issue was sweetening my coffee. It took me a solid 2 years to quit using Coffeemate creamer. I worked my way from Coffeemate to Nutpods creamer, to half and half with sugar. A year ago I switched from using regular sugar to Splenda. At the end of December, I switched from Splenda to monkfruit and don’t plan to go back. This feels like a huge win for me since coffee is required to help me function.

Job 3 : reel it in with booze and alcoholic beverages. Did we celebrate every night during winter break? Yes. But also acknowledge the need to take a break from it and let my body heal. I recently learned how long it takes the liver to detox alcohol, and putting your liver into over-drive having to metabolize alcohol takes away from its job to detox other things from your body. I am deep into perimenopause and need my liver to process things like estrogen during certain points in my cycle, rather than spending energy processing alcohol. About 3 years ago I started noticing my body wasn’t processing alcohol like it used to. Having more than one drink and its a guarantee for a terrible night of sleep. Depending on the drink itself, I would wake up in the middle of the night feeling anxious and panicky. Not good. We are now 11 days into Dry January and am already feeling less bloated. Between skipping sugar and booze, I am also down 5 pounds. So something is working here.

So there you have it. The secret to my eventual success. I’m scheduling self-care this year and holding myself more accountable. I’m starting with a few small changes to ease into it and hopefully I will gain momentum as I go along.