A Celeb Wellness Expert's Secret To Sticking With Health Goals

Food intolerance is sneaky, and symptoms often don't show up for a few days. Even when people do their best to remove particularly triggering foods, sometimes the tiniest bit of gluten or soy can sneak in and derail their success. However, I've found a simple way to help people identify these foods so that they can finally meet their health goals: tracking. 

The same principle applies to staying mindful of other health practices—as research shows setting a goal alone1 doesn't work. Saying, "I'm not going to eat gluten or other highly reactive foods" is ineffective. Tracking is the key to staying motivated and reaching your health goals. Tracking your goals2 also helps reveal your progress, creates clear milestones, and shows you how well you're sticking to your plans. 

When I work one-on-one with clients, I require them to keep a food journal because it begets amazing results. If you've tracked every bite in your food journal, you'll be much more likely to identify the culprit if one certain food is hijacking your success. You'll also gather important intel about which foods cause you problems. 

I want you to write down what you eat but also pay attention to when you ate it and how you felt afterward. That way, if gluten, for example, slipped into your plan and you start experiencing brain fog or fatigue a day or two later, you can connect the dots. Likewise, you can identify the sneaky sugars that found their way into your breakfast and the energy crash that followed. 

Timing is critical, particularly when it comes to intermittent fasting. When you track factors such as your eating hours along with how you feel, you then have helpful data to determine what works for you…and what doesn't. 

When it comes to meeting your health goals, sleep should be high on that list. Unfortunately, it's not a priority for many people. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC3) over one-third of American adults are not getting at least seven hours of their recommended nightly sleep.

Whether you want to support your gut, improve your energy and focus, or succeed in any other goal, I recommend eight to nine hours of deep, restorative sleep every single night. 

"High-quality sleep fortifies your immune system, balances your hormones, boosts your metabolism, increases your physical energy, and improves the function of your brain," says Shawn Stevenson in Sleep Smarter. "Unless you give your body the right amount of sleep, you will never, I repeat never, have the body and life you want to have."

Even before the pandemic, studies were emerging that the general population is more stressed out than ever before. The last two years only continued to dial that up. Although you can't eliminate stress, you can find ways to manage it. And tracking can help. 

When it comes to measuring stress, I'm a fan of tracking specific factors like heart rate variability (HRV). This number reveals how your body can adapt to stress levels, which can subsequently affect mental and physical conditions like depression and diabetes. People who have a high HRV can usually better manage stress. 

Stress affects everyone differently. A situation that one person can sail through might seriously frazzle your personal nervous system. Likewise, everyone has different ways of managing their stress. Unsurprisingly, many of these methods are trackable. You might meditate for 20 minutes in the morning and again in the afternoon. Or you might take restorative yoga classes twice a week. If those options are too time-consuming, try setting a timer for five minutes and practicing mindfulness a few times each day to give yourself some relief. 

Adding more movement into every day is critical for meeting your health goals. That can include parking your car farther from the grocery store or even taking the stairs, but each of these little actions will eventually add up to bigger changes. 

Monitoring how quickly your heart rate returns to normal after exercise is another great benchmark for your health. The more intense your workout, the longer it will take for your heart rate to return to its resting state.

A tracker will be able to measure heart rate, or you can do it manually by checking your pulse on your wrist, counting for 15 seconds, and multiplying that number by four. Do this again one minute later to see how much your heart rate has declined in that time.

Cultivating your purpose is one of the most important steps toward achieving a fulfilling, happy life. Many of us search for community on social media, and there's nothing wrong with occasionally scrolling through Facebook or Instagram, but that's not really what defines community.

Meaningful connection means spending time with friends and loved ones—even your pets. We've especially learned the value of in-real-life connections throughout the last two years as social distancing and quarantine forced many of us to isolate or feel isolated.

Connecting with others has many benefits, even within supporting your health goals. According to researchers, social connection and feeling connected5 "can help people maintain a healthy body mass index, control blood sugar, improve cancer survival, decrease cardiovascular mortality, decrease depressive symptoms, mitigate post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms, and improve overall mental health."