If you didn’t know its Plastic Free July… Will you be joining in and making more of an effort to cut down your plastic waste? This is not new news, but even if you haven’t taken any steps so far, you can easily start NOW!
Here are a few quick and easy tips to help you out:
Reusable Water Bottle: These are EVERYWHERE, its so much better for the environment when you reuse a bottle rather than buying one every time you’re out, and might I add a hell of lot cheeper long term.
Reusable Travel Mug: Again, super easy to get hold of and you get money OFF your take away coffees when you buy in a store. We invested in a coffee machine a few years ago. Heres some quick math for our yearly coffee expenditure: x2 coffees five days a week at an average of £3.50 is £1820 per year!! Break down the cost of our coffee machine and the coffee we buy for it, and it comes to £268 per year. Thats a saving of £1552 per year… if that’s not an incentive to get a travel mug then I don’t know what is. And knowing that you’re NOT contributing to the millions of takeaway cups being thrown away every day is a good feeling as well.
Flask: As a family we are outside as much as possible. We take supplies with us for the day for a number of reasons. A couple are that we can eat when we want, we don’t have to worry about finding somewhere to buy food from and we are not buying more food in plastic packaging. One thing we always take out with us is a flask filled with hot chocolate for the kids, they absolutely LOVE sitting on a log in the ‘wild’ and sipping on a hot choccie. I also fill it with coffee for long bike rides..
Cutlery: Invest in some portable cutlery so that you can eat your homemade lunch, or store bought lunch that needs a fork, so that you’re not using a plastic fork once and then binning it.
Reusable Bags: This should be second nature by now otherwise I presume you’ve mastered the balancing act of all your groceries. I’ll admit, its a skill.
To help you on your Plastic Free July Journey, I’ve teamed up with MIZU and snagged you a 20% discount code for the entire month of July! Just use the code MIZULEX on checkout to get your 20% off anything you wanted to help you along your Plastic Free Journey 🙂
I’m not sure where December and January went… anyone know? Ah I remember, December we were wiped out with a horrible virus that just.would.not.leave, and January was spent on the back foot, catching up with everything missed in December. But we’re here now and back up to speed.
So Resolutions! 2019 I listed a whole bunch which were mainly focussed on a family effort to cut down on our waste, you can check out what those points were here Resolutions 2019 I feel that we stuck to a lot of the goals when it came to cutting down waste, but there is so much more room for improvement.
Things we nailed were: water bottles, travel coffee cups, metal straws, carrier bags, soap bars, washing powder, rechargeable batteries, ground coffee, making packed lunches (instead of buying in wrappers), natural shower scrubbers, reusable make-up cloths, shampoo bars, loose fruit & veg, buying less stuff, saying no to receipts on non important purchase or getting them emailed, splitting items that are part recyclable and part non recyclable, washing out packaging before it goes in the recycle bin / glass bin, making our own pizza dough which is healthier and no packaging!
Room for improvement:
I’ve gotten slack on taking my own containers to supermarkets, as you really seem to have to fight your case as to why you don’t want to buy in packaging. This is a shame as somedays I’m up for the conversation, and some days I’m more like, meh.. I will try my best to take my own containers going forward.
I have yet to visit a new re-fill store that has opened up near to me which I should have done a few weeks ago..
I don’t like my hair conditioning bar, its not very good? Help, please let me know if you’ve found one that leaves your hair feeling silky smooth.
So thats the waste section done.. on to diet, health and fitness. Last year I continued on my ‘journey’, everything is a journey, so en trend, anyway, I still practice yoga every single day first thing in the morning (thats 18 months guys!!) and I still love it. (You can read about my 365 days of yoga here.) I started to dabble in doing a Hiit workout before my yoga, which I did manage to do a few times, but I would like to make more effort this year, when I do get up, I enjoy going into my day knowing that I’ve already got a sweat on, and feeling smug AF. I also focussed on getting stronger last year.
Diet. I get asked about my diet, a lot. Like its a big secret, but its really not. I’m an active person, I cook at home and I don’t eat many processed foods, and I drink a lot of water. My diet does change as I’m always learning about what food can do to your body and the science behind it, like I’ve been researching a more plant based diet over the past few months. The biggest change I’ve made is switching from cows milk to a non dairy option, at the moment I’m loving oat milk. But this might be another blog entirely, (let me know if you want a ‘what I eat in a day’ blog).
Time: now our kids are four and seven, we’re out of the trenches, we can, and do, take them anywhere (not that that stopped us before! but its easier now) as they can start to interact with the family activities now, like we ALL went rock climbing last week and it was so so fun! And also more date nights. We’re big on family dinners in our house and we all sit down for a home cooked meal in the evenings, which is a luxury now, because just a couple of years ago, my husband used to leave for work before we woke up, and get home after the kids were in bed. So these meals are great, but they revolve around the kids, so we don’t actually get to have a good catch up, so 2020 is the year of the date night. Investing in my man.. and any chance to not have to cook an evening meal. Seriously, is there a competition where I can win a chef for a year? Sign me up.
So there are my Resolutions for 2020:
1. Continue to cut down on waste and learn more about different ways to cut down
2. Get a workout in before yoga a few times a week
3. More date nights
4. More activities with the kids
5. Continue to learn about food and how they are linked to health
It was on the 20th June 2018 that I started doing yoga everyday.
Why? Yoga is something that I’ve always turned to in times of need. That sounds a bit dramatic, when I say need.. I mean, I couldn’t do any other sport.
So quickly, the three main times I’ve used it is when I was 19 and I’d had knee surgery. I was prepped to have a couple of days on crutches but once the surgeon had got in there, it turned out I’d done loads of damage, which led to being non-weight baring for TWO MONTHS. What the hell. They were a dark two months. I even turned to art to let out some emotion. Good lord. So after learning how to walk again, I turned to yoga to get my body moving.
Then I used yoga after having both babies, as you can’t just pop out a kid and hit the water two weeks later. And I don’t do very well when I can’t move my body, its how I think, brainstorm, plan, let anger out, grieve.. you get the picture. So yoga allowed me to start moving again.
I’d wanted to start doing yoga everyday for a long time, like a year, but NEVER made any effort to actually do it. Then it was my husbands birthday (and it was a big birthday) and I had a mid life crises. Not him. Me. What? I freaked out. Like, shit, we’re not getting any younger. Our bodies are only going downhill from here, I don’t want that to be it, I’m going to die!…. all of that.
That evening I did yoga.
I felt calmer.
That night I said to my husband, ‘I’m going to do yoga before you and the kids get up.’ I set my alarm for 6:30 (the household comes downstairs at 7am). The alarm went off the following morning, I got up and did a morning yoga routine on you-tube.
I felt amazing. Number one because I’d just woken my body up with yoga, but secondly because I had actually done it! And then I did it the next day, and the next… before I knew it, I’d done a week of yoga every morning. My days were better, I was eating better (you know me, I’m always over-hauling my diet, I love learning about different foods and what health benefits they have), and my mood considerably improved.
Downward facing dog: June 2018Slowly getting there: May 2019
Noticing my mood with the kids was the real eye opener. Whether you have kids or not, sometimes you’re not in the best mood first thing in the morning. So for me, being thrown 101 questions and demands before I’d had my breakfast was a shit way to start my day. Everyday… until the end of time. Amen.
So, now with the yoga kick starting my day, I have limbered up, I’ve oxygenated my blood, got the blood moving around my body and gone through my checklist of three things to be grateful for in my life. (And I do between 10 – 20mins of yoga in the morning, not loads, but just enough). When the kids come down at 7am, I’m ready for them with a smile on my face, open arms for a morning cuddle and down to make breakfast, (I’m on hot water with lemon, porridge with walnuts, almonds, raisins and coconut, with full fat cows milk, maybe I’ll switch to a nut milk one day but I like dairy for now).
I honestly don’t think there were any more than 10 days in the last 365 days where I haven’t done yoga.
What have I noticed from doing yoga nearly everyday for a year?
1. I sleep better
2. I’m happier
3. I deal with things in a much calmer way
4. I’m stronger physically
5. I recover from workouts faster than I used to (yoga is stretching everyone, shhhhh)
6. I haven’t had any injury (touch wood!)
7. I feel agile, which I bloody love!
8. I feel 25 (I am not 25).
9. I want to eat better because I’ve started the day with movement
10. I can’t think of a single negative. Honestly. None. Nothing. Nada.
Doing yoga nearly everyday for a year wasn’t an experiment for me, I wanted to make a lifestyle change, a manageable one which I feel I’ve achieved. I wanted to be able to do the things I used to do in gymnastics, I want to push my body past what I could do as a kid, and stay active and agile for the rest of my life. I really didn’t expect it to have the effect it did on my daily mood that it did.
And now I’ve achieved one goal… its onto the next…
What I would love to do is get up a little earlier to get a 20min run/bike/hiit session in, and then yoga. We shall see… I’d need to get up at like 6am to fit all that in and then I’d need extra time to make a huge breakfast after that kind of activity! Mmmm fruit and banana pancakes…
I hope you’ve enjoyed this blog, maybe it’ll inspire one person out there to start integrating yoga, movement & mindfulness into their daily routine! 🙂 Do you do yoga often? What are your thoughts on it? Let me know if you’d like me to send you a few links to the morning yoga you tube videos that I followed!
June 2018May 2019The Crow: June 2018The Crow: May 2019
Lex Balladon 