HABIT TRACKER FOR THE CREATIVE TYPE

How colorful can you make your week or month?

Tracking habits that you are trying to build or maintain increases your chances of making that habit stick. Yeah, yeah,🙄 we’ve been told this a thousand times.

But if you are anything like me, the stress of a to-do list looking tracker might slow your progress and make you feel down-right guilty when you see all the unchecked boxes representing when you weren’t “on top of your game”.

Somehow it can feel like you are tracking your failures and not your successes. So taking that tracker out of sight [and putting it into the trash] feels like you just escaped a micromanaging boss. [Can you tell that I also don’t like to be told what to do?🤣]

But along with throwing out your tracker, you also throw out your dedication to the good habits you want to integrate into part of who you are.

Which leads you right back to where you started.

This has happened to me countless times. I finally figured out that I needed something different: a tracker that came to life as I did well and made me feel good to look at it.

So I designed a tracker a bit different than most. It’s designed like a coloring book!

🌸The first version uses flowers in place of checkmark boxes. 🌸

If you can relate to my experience, the solution for you might also be as simple as changing the tool you are using. Instead of checklist boxes, maybe you’d do better with color. Maybe your strength lies in making something more beautiful. Try this tool and see if it helps you get the job done🔨

How to use The Habit Tracker for Creative Types:

1. There is a weekly tracker sheet and a monthly tracker sheet. Just pick the time frame that works best for you.

2. Choose which habits you are focusing on for that time frame and assign each habit to an item on the big picture. You can get more specific by adding a specific color to each item if you want.

3. Place your picture on your fridge or somewhere else that you’ll see it everyday to remind you of your goals.

4. Each day, as you would with a checkbox, color in one item that corresponds to the habit you accomplished that day.

5. Your goal for that week or month is to color in as much of your big picture as you can.

6. At the end, and all throughout, you’ll be able to visually see your progress by how much color you’ve given to the big picture by all of the little things you’ve accomplished each day. If you’ve been using a consistent color for each habit, you’ll also be able to quickly see which habits you’re strongest in by how much of that color you see. You’ll also know which habits to put more effort into when you notice which colors you want to get more of into your big picture.

Again, the goal of using this tracker is to help you develop and maintain good habits in a way that keeps your focus on the big picture and your successes rather than dwelling on the tiny details and feeling guilty if you slip on some of them.

Persistence is more powerful than perfection.

Where to get the Habit Tracker for Creative Types:👇

Create a free account with Berry Fit Academy and gain access to this and other free resources in our resource library. Check it out HERE

If you try this out, please comment with your experience and even share your picture with us!

💌P.S. I did have and idea to make other versions, including some that are children friendly, so the entire family can track habits together and encourage each other….what do you think? Any suggestions on themes that you’d be happy to see on your fridge?

CAN YOU TRUST YOUR DOCTOR?

Your doctor has the best intentions, but their hands are tied by the system they work for.

Read on to discover more about:

• Doctors as human beings.

• How the health system they work for isn't designed for your long term health.

• What the health system is really good at.

• And when you can actually trust your doctor and the health system (because sadly you can't always trust them whole-heartedly…yet).

Doctors are some of the smartest, most hardworking, caring people we have on earth.

They deserve our highest appreciation and admiration. But there's more to your doctor than meets the eye.

They endure the ruthless world of becoming a doctor: years of schooling, sleepless nights, 90 hour work weeks at residency, stress of mounting debt, social pressures, and jump through many other required hoops. Throughout it all they keep their vision of changing the world by helping people at the center of their minds.

As they see it if they can just make it through the med student grind and come out on the other side with a nice long white coat and an M.D. engraved next to their name, they would be free to really begin making a difference in peoples lives and it'll all be worth it. But…

A doctor's post-grad reality isn't often what they dreamed of.

What many of them later discover is that donning that white lab coat doesn't give them the power and freedom of the queen on the chessboard, righting wrongs and healing their fellow humans, but anoints them instead only as a pawn to a system with a different goal: profits.

This system is made up of big hospitals, drug companies, and insurance companies. All with the governments' backing. They are the big players on the board, making the big moves and decisions.

Our valiant Pawn M.D. —as we'll call our new doctor— soon finds that they must work long hours with little sleep, and are allotted only seven minutes with each of their patients. They must also master the skill of figuring out how many insurance codes they can tack on to each of those seven minute appointments.

Because the more codes Pawn M.D. enters the more money the hospital makes.

The hospital in turn rewards their pawn with pay bonuses, provided Pawn M.D. reaches certain productivity quotas. Pawn M.D. scores the most points when they prescribe long term drugs and surgeries to their patients, which are the big money makers for the system. The system doesn't actually make much money when people get well. Currently, the system has found profound methods for driving profits through incentivizing and even “educating” doctors.

The system has infiltrated doctors education.

Then Pawn M.D. begins to realize that from the very beginning they were being primed to comply with the systems' goals during their medical education. Medical schools are heavily sponsored by drug companies and their top educators are highly trained surgeons.

These surgeons learned that in order to "make it" as a doctor in this system you must specialize in one part of the body and perform surgeries and other interventions on it. That's who gets rewarded with the big money, the prestige, and with the longest white coat.

No joke: the longer your white coat, the higher your status in the hospital world.

The drug companies have an interest, of course, to get their drugs prescribed as much as possible.

And so it is that Pawn M.D. is trained by the very system that profits the most when its' pawns diagnose their patients with a chronic (long lasting) condition like diabetes or heart disease and prescribe life-long drugs, or a condition to be fixed with surgeries.

A doctor's internal conflict

Pawn M.D. is aware that the prevention and treatment of most chronic diseases lie heavily in the lifestyle factors of their patients like diet and exercise, but they were only taught nutrition during medical school for a whopping 24 hours. There is also a next to zero chance of helping a patient learn about their health within their seven minute appointment times.

Besides, even if Pawn M.D. wanted to change how they treated their patients, deviating from the system's status quo and policies, they risk losing their livelihood and the respect of their compliant peers.

Tow the line, or lose everything you've worked for.

This is the predicament that puts Pawn M.D. into a state of internal conflict: wanting the best for their patients, but restricted in their movements and ability to truly help them.

Pawn M.D.'s hands are tied. At least until the system changes.

Can patients trust their doctors?

So what about you, the patient of Pawn M.D.? Can you trust your doctor?

The answer is yes!… and no.

First, you must realize that your doctor has the best intentions. They are also very smart and know a lot about the human body. On the flip side, you must also realize that they are human, and have blind spots.

What our modern health system is really good at is fixing acute health issues.

An acute health condition is one that can be severe but is of short duration: seasonal sickness, infections, and injuries are good examples of acute conditions.

Trust your doctor with acute conditions with all your heart.

The biggest blindspot for doctors is chronic disease management and prevention.

Chrono is greek for time. So a chronic condition or disease is one that developed slowly, persists for a long period of time, and doesn't go away easily.

Examples of chronic dieases are:

• Diabetes

• Heart disease

• Obesity

• Cancer

• Arthritis

• Alzheimer's disease

This is a blindspot for doctors because the best methods of prevention and treatment for these conditions aren't taught well in medical school — because they do not make much money for the system.

If you are diagnosed with a chronic condition listen to your doctor, but also do your own research.

For your best health outcomes it is important that you become informed on conditions you have (or want to avoid). Research lifestyle factors that are linked to these conditions. Usually these lifestyle factors are related to physical activity, sleep, diet, and environmental toxins. Treat yourself with these lifestyle changes. These are things your doctor cannot help you much with.

There are times when lifestyle factors alone won't get you the changes you need quickly enough. Educate yourself on when seeking your doctors help with drugs or other interventions is necessary for your health.

The ideal situation would be that an intervention or drug is a last resort or only temporary to help you get your health on track.

Remember, your doctor wants to help you, and they will do so in the best ways that they can. But they've had their hands tied by the system and are thus limited in that capability…like a pawn on the chessboard.

My sincere hope is for Pawn M.D. to be promoted within the system because they are the true advocates and first line of defense for their patients.

But until your doctors are more empowered to help you with chronic conditions….

Optimal health starts with your self education and your lifestyle.

P.S. Food for thought

Directly following his famous warnings of the military-industrial complex during his farewell address in 1961, Dwight D Eisenhower warned of a scientific complex that closely resembles our current medical system:

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

-Dwight D Eisenhower

Watch his entire speech here: https://youtu.be/mHDgsh6WPyc

FEELING FAT OR ANXIOUS? HERE’S WHY…

Feeling fat or anxious? 10,000 years ago, you’d have the advantage!

Ancient humans were subject to much harsher and ever changing conditions than we are today. We’ve become pretty skilled at building amazing shelters, AKA homes, to the level of controlling the climate in our shelter (I’ve even got a little space heater warming up my feet as I type)! We’ve even figured out how to have fully prepared food delivered to us without even having to leave the shelter of our cozy, comfortable homes. What a life we have created for ourselves now.

But back before we had the conveniences of modern society, everyday required a physical and mental effort to acquire nutrients. Our life depended on being active in order to get what we needed. We also had to work with what nature gave us depending on the season. Summertime often meant that fruits and vegetation were more readily available, while winter generally meant we needed to rely more on animal meat and hunting. For thousands of years our genes have been adapting to these changes and the signals our bodies get from our environment, including our food. Seasons of feast, famine, hard work, and rest were the norm.

We also had to be concerned about severe threats to our physical safety. Extreme weather,  large predators, and poisonous plants were everyday concerns. Being on alert wherever we went to avoid an attack, watching for signs of terrible weather approaching, running from danger, avoiding poisonous things. In this type of environment, caution is king and our big brains helped us analyze threats and prepare for the worst.

Can you guess which humans survived? The fat storing worry warts!

Think it’s your fault that you don’t want to get up off the couch? Nope, your genes are telling your body that you need to conserve energy! That’s right, the humans that could conserve energy and store enough fat to fuel their brain and body through the winter survived. The ones that worried the most and avoided physical danger survived. And they passed all those good traits on to you!

It took humans thousands of years of natural selection to optimize for our survival in these harsh conditions. Then with the help of all that fat we were able to store, our brains grew, we became smarter, and we started coming up with ingenious ways of making our life easier. This has worked really well for us. Food is much easier to come by and we are able to avoid succumbing to a multitude of illnesses and infections. But we’ve unknowingly created for ourselves other problems because we’ve changed our environment faster than our genes could adapt to alongside.

Your body doesn’t know that there is a grocery store around the corner year round, and your subconscious brain is still looking for threats. So by trying to prepare you for what it thinks is the worst, your body is making you fat and anxious…a big thanks to your body for helping you out, right?

Now-a-days knowing what is harmful to us isn’t as immediate as it was in our ancient past. Ate some poisonous berries? You’d realize pretty quickly that you made a mistake. But being diagnosed with diabetes? That problem was likely brewing for years, and what is the problem anyways?  Our major threats are different now, they are generally more slow to develop like heart disease and depression.

The good news is that you can work with your ancient genes to improve your health and reduce anxiety. All you need to do is understand a little about how your modern lifestyle clashes with what your genes have been built for. You can build for yourself a lifestyle that utilizes the aspects of modern life that are aligned with your body (like eating whole foods), and reduce or avoid those aspects that aren’t (like sitting in and office all day). 

Us humans are pretty inventive. Now, after eons of inventing ways to make life more comfortable and safe, we get to use that creativity to enjoy life! We now get to be creative with what we eat instead of scrounging for scraps, and the exercise that our bodies evolved for doesn’t have to be for desperate searches for food… it gets to be fun!