Good morning! No one gave me any feedback on what to put in this section last week lol, so I’m gonna show you pics of my Ninja Creami creations. 🍨 

Check those out! The first is a chocolate chocolate chip and the right one is vanilla with blueberries. Both include protein powder and Fairlife milk and almond milk. Each one contains 30-40g of protein and is low sugar. Score! Honestly 8/10 would recommend, and I’ll only get better at my recipes. 🤤 

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🧹 Spring Cleaning Your Health

It’s that time of year when we dust off the cobwebs and venture into the great vitamin D-producing outdoors! If you’re like most people, the extra daylight, fresh spring green, and overall vibe shift may have given you a motivational boost to tidy up and clean out your space.

My guess is that also if you’re like most people, you’ve been grinding since January. The new year, new goals, new motivations… Either you’ve kept them going strong or they’ve skid you into a burnout. Or you flat out gave up, no judgment.

It’s also the end of the school year, and if you’re not in school, someone in your life probably is in it or teaching it. Maybe you’re looking up from your work and asking, “How the HECK are we in the last week of April?!”

Stress levels may be high. Health and fitness priorities may have taken the backseat to other more pressing priorities as the speed of everything seems to have only ramped up.

• As incredibly rough as the spring of 2020 was, I think it was an incredible moment for us to collectively breathe in spring when many responsibilities and activities dropped to near-zero. The slowness of that season probably feels like a distant memory now.

All this to say, your health could probably use a “spring cleaning” just like your bathroom and closet could. Let’s stand up, shake it out, and do a little reset to get our health priorities back in order.

Here are five simple tips to spring clean your health.

1. Check your hydration

Are you under-hydrating? Over-caffeinating (which isn’t inherently a bad thing, but can disrupt your sleep and compound dehydration)? 

Hydration is essential for everything we do. It not only drastically affects our exercise performance, but has significant effects on our mental capacity and output as well. Even a very small degree of dehydration can slow down and impair a host of mental performance measures.

Of course, it’s also possible to over-hydrate. Not many of us are doing that, but if you’re going crazy, slow it down or at least add back in some electrolytes.

Simple tip: Keep a water bottle or glass near you throughout the day. Depending on your activity level, aiming for somewhere between half to 100% of your body weight (in pounds) in ounces of water is a good target. Add zero- or low-calorie flavors if taste is an issue!

2. Prioritize whole foods

At this point, you may have a freezer full of Girl Scout cookies and Easter/Eid/Passover candies. Especially if life is feeling a bit fast-paced right now, it’s probably easy to go for foods and snacks that are quick and easy. And that often means ultra-processed. Which also often means calorically-dense and nutrient-sparse.

It’s also the season of first harvests and more fresh produce available! Try to clean out the ultra-processed things that have piled up in your house and stock up on real, whole foods the next time you hit the grocery store. Prioritize healthy protein sources and lots of plants.

3. Make sure you’ve got a movement habit

Discipline? Motivation?? Never heard of them. At least not when juggling a million things. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed these days, and when we do, we often fall back on our default habits. 

If your habit to cope with stress is binging a whole bag of chips while watching a new show, there’s a good chance you’ll fall back on that. However, if regular movement or exercise becomes a habit, your body will start to crave it and drive you naturally toward it.  

Personally, exercise is just about as much for my mental health as it is physical. I may not always notice it when I’m partaking regularly, but you better believe I start to notice when it’s absent. 

Fight the modern urge to let a sedentary, comfort-first lifestyle be your default. Make a habit of movement, whether it’s post-meal walks, lifting with your buddy every night, weekly dance classes, or anything else. Build it into your routine, and the “motivation” won’t even matter.

4. Declutter your brain space

If you’ve already got a thousand competing deadlines and priorities running through your mind, it can easily get cluttered up there. Whatever the method, find a practice that helps you simplify and organize and streamline. 

If you’re anything like me, your fitness priorities might have gotten a bit cluttered, too: You are halfway to your New Year’s resolution and want to lose 10 more pounds of fat. But you also want to put on some muscle for a bit. And there’s that race coming up that you need to train for. But you also should work on your squat mobility. And you’ve been meaning to try out these new smoothie recipes. But first you wanna use that air fryer you got for Christmas to cook more fresh veggies. Oh and your back is hurting, so you should probably do some rehab for that.

Anyone else?

For me, physically writing things down works well. If I can get it on paper, I can come back to it later, remind myself of it anytime, and check it off when it’s done. 

And speaking from experience, you probably can’t do it all at once, no matter how you’ve tried to convince yourself. Wrangle it all in. Streamline. Prioritize. Define your goals.

• Even schedule out your exercise macro-cycle plan for the year if you have to!

  • e.g. cut till June, get in race shape for September, bulk through the holidays, etc.

5. Manage your stress

Sure, this was touched on in some of the other points, but it bears repeating. Nothing in our life functions well if we’re operating at a high level of stress. By finding simple, doable ways to manage stress, our physical health and everything else can more easily fall into place. 

There are a million options, so choose what works for you:

• Meditating or breathwork for 5–10 minutes every morning or night

• a gratitude journal or practice with your family

• a regular sauna or occasional massage

• a daily phone call to a loved one

• a long, silent shower to end the day

The list goes on. Just be sure to engage in destressing practices and let yourself unwind. And always, always prioritize good quantity and quality sleep.

T(id)ying it all together 🎀 

Cleaning up your health this spring shouldn’t be intimidating or even difficult. Perform a little audit of your practices and evaluate if you’re on track to meet your goals. Take judgment-free notes and make adjustments where necessary. 

It may not smell like fresh kitchen lemons when you’re done, but I guarantee the results will be sweeter than lemonade. 🍋 

✅ Take Action

Every newsletter's Take Action section will invite you to take small steps to improve your health. Recognizing that we all have different capabilities, I'll offer three different levels of action you can choose to take.

Level 1: Just pick one area to clean up your health. I bet it’ll snowball into other healthy habits!

Level 2: Pick a few, or even all five! There’s no feeling quite like looking over a freshly cleaned room, and maybe you’ll feel the same if you spring clean your health.

Level 3: Perform a big-old health & fitness audit. Think back to January—based on where you thought you’d be almost four months later, how’s it going? What are you proud of and want to continue? What needs some adjustment? Where can you be another four months from now if you set your mind to it?

This newsletter is brought to you by… me!

Interested in becoming a sponsor? Know someone else who might be? I’d love to get to know you and/or your business and see how we can partner together. Reply to this email!

✍️ Drew's Picks:

• Heed: 101 pieces of incredible advice. I wish there was an easy way to remind myself of one of these per day. If anyone has an idea for how to set this up quickly, please share!

• Chill: Awards that do not exist, but that so many of us are trying to compete for anyway.

  • Side note: I haven’t used the word “busy” to describe myself since 2019. This conscious mindset shift has helped me feel less stressed & eliminated the need to wear the “busy badge.”

• Contemplate: Finally some reporting on big ultra-processed food companies who act like they’re sooo healthy for us but kinda… aren’t. And the diet influencers who push their products. Keep it nuanced, y’all!

See you back here in May. How crazy is that?!

If you enjoyed this newsletter, please take 5 seconds to share the link with some friends and encourage them to sign up. This community is better when we’re bigger and more diverse! 🗺️ 

Keep moving,

Drew

The content in Move to Improve is meant to be informative in nature, but it should not be taken as medical advice. It is always a good idea to consult with a trusted health professional before making any major lifestyle changes that could have a significant impact on your health. This is not a medical resource, and any opinions and articles are not intended for use as diagnosis, prevention, and/or treatment of health problems. They are not substitutes for consulting a qualified medical professional. Please think critically and take what I say with a grain of salt (aka don’t sue me).