Pre Flight Orientation
The Resource Guide has tons of how-to videos, tips and tricks for all the practices and even recipes to help you get the most out of your Six Week Challenge. To get to the Resource Guide, look for the “Resources” tab in your menu bar.
Based on years of psychology research, the WOOP is a simple exercise that is proven to help people change their habits. We use the WOOP in our calls, so here’s a 3 minute video on how the WOOP works.
Prepare Your Space
This is maybe the most important tip and step for preparing for the Six Week Challenge. Out of sight, out of reach. Make sure you get all the sugar-added and processed foods out of your house. Pack them up and donate them to food programs, or compost them or give them away.
If you live with others who are not getting with the program, ask them to put their sugar-added and processed foods together so you have a clear space for your whole food nutrition.
Select a tranquil, undisturbed area in your home, ensuring it’s a space where you feel at ease. Furnish it with a comfortable seat, perhaps a cushion or chair, and enhance the ambiance with soft lighting or candles. Add a few personal, calming elements like plants, a small water feature, or meaningful symbols, and maintain a clutter-free environment for a clear, peaceful mind.
Remove electronics from the bedroom for the duration of the program and commit to shutting them all down an hour before your zzz’s this week. Read a book instead and set the intention to fall asleep and wake up at same time each day to get your rhythm set ahead.
Prepare Your Time
Put a reminder in your calendar for the weekly calls so you don’t miss them!
Putting your workouts on the calendar means you’re making time for it. So make time for it, literally. Book classes, pick out YouTube workouts you want to try and/or set workout dates with a friend.!
Set reminders to reach out to long-lost friends. Are there any birthdays upcoming up during the next six weeks? Any family or friends having another milestone event?
You can also make a list of family members and friends who would love to get a note, text, or email from. Reaching out just to say “hi” definitely counts as an intentional act of kindness!
Looking ahead over the next six weeks – are there events where you might be especially tempted?
WOOP that! (WOOP is a thought exercise that helps you plan for success in changing your habits.)
Prepare Your Nutrition
Get rid of last-minute hunger panic by finding recipes that make your mouth water and make you look forward to eating! Browse the web for Whole30 recipes. Look at the pictures, get hungry and inspired. This will make your meal planning so. much. easier. We also recommend using an app like PlanToEat or CopyMeThat which will not only collect your recipes for you, but also make shopping lists from the ingredients! Check the Resource Guide for more info.
Choose from the recipes and put them into the calendar so you know what you’ll be eating for the next week. If you use a service like Plan to Eat or Copy Me That, they’ll help you collect recipes and create a shopping list.
Just take it one week at a time. Or, if do more if you’re down for that. The point is to make a bunch of your food decisions in advance so you don’t fall prey to temptation when you get hangry.
Figure out and acquire what food ingredients you’ll need for the weeks’ meal plan.
Acquire the food.
The Resource Guide has lots of videos on making meal plans. Get into a rhythm of planning and prepping your meals for the week in advance to take the guesswork and temptation to reach for processed food.
Don’t think you have to plan your meals out for the entire six weeks. Just do one week at a time. And share your recipes and meal prep tips with the community! Someone will surely learn something from you!
Ok, this is a little different than a “meal plan”. Having healthy snacks at the ready will make it much easier to make healthy choices when the hunger hits. Make sure you have some boiled eggs, sliced veggies, etc. ready when you need them the most.
This is an easy task to check off once you’ve made your meal plan and shopping list. You know what to do. Go get ’em!
Record Baseline Data
Even though the Six Week Challenge is not a weight loss program per se, and we don’t recommend having your weight be the primary metric of success, it’s still a good marker to record. Just don’t let this be your primary focus over the next six weeks. Change the habits and the weight will take care of itself.
In the morning before you get out of bed, count the number of hear beats in 15 seconds. Multiply that by 4 to get your resting heart rate. You can also doing this during the day if you’ve been sitting still for at least 5 minutes, preferably 10. Honestly easier in the morning, but you do you.
We don’t notice the day-to-day changes, but capturing the moment in time before you started this journey will give you a clear picture of how far you’ll have come when you pause for a minute and look back.
Eliminating sugar and processed foods from your nutrition intake can significantly change your body’s chemistry. We found a number of services you can order bloodwork to be done. Here’s a list of labwork vendors you can use to order lab tests directly.