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Epic Choices For The New Year By Ashleigh Ponder

Epic Choices For The New Year By Ashleigh Ponder

As a social person at heart, I’ve always loved Christmas and the New Year. Enjoying the festivities with my favourite people honestly does fill me with joy. I also love new beginnings, I very much think that there’s ‘no time like the present’ to begin a fresh new direction whenever we need to… but there’s nothing quite like a new year for a fresh start.

2017 has me excited. It’s the year I turn 18, the year I head off to university and the year I’m determined will be my best yet!

Specifically, my goals for 2017 are:

• Do as well as I possibly can in my A Levels

* Successfully complete a Tough Mudder in August

* Learn how to drive & pass my driving test

* Lean out following my strength and mass phase in 2016

* Start and develop my YouTube channel, creating a more interactive and visual style of post

A real theme I’ll be focussing on is ‘steady progress’. By this, I mean implementing one new habit at a time in order to achieve my ‘ideal’ situation. Some changes will be quite quick to adapt to, but I know others will take longer to gent comfortable with.

I think this is a really important theme for me as I have a real tendency to leap into things and then get burnt out. Practically, this means not all of my goals are realised – or some come at the expense of others.

An example of how I’ll employ this approach can be seen nutritionally. Rather than launching into a harsh deficit, I will first focus on the foundations of any health and wellness routine – factors such as sleep and management of external stressors.

As these underpin how we feel and how we think, it will not only help to implement healthier practices overall, but will make further changes to my lifestyle easier to adhere to.

In terms of a fat loss phase, adherence is key. It doesn’t have to be punishing or unhealthily restrictive – just consistent, and appropriately set up to accommodate other parts of my life at the same time. If a change fits my lifestyle, it will stick, and make the next phases of my journey more productive too!

More than anything, I want to make sure I really take care of myself in 2017 and respect the goals I want to achieve. Some more, unexpected ones are probably going to crop up as the year unfolds as well.

I’m definitely looking forward to the year ahead, and I feel a really comforting sense of calmness and confidence about it. Bring it on!

Written by Ashleigh Ponder @balancednotclean

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