The Power of Creating Personal Rituals to Improve Your Health – Guest Post by Joanna Frankham

Joanna Frankham helps you to make diet and lifestyle choices that serve you. She is an AIP Mentor and Certified Health Coach who uses rituals and tools (like her signature ‘Create Your Personal Morning Ritual’ eCourse) to help you break down the AIP framework into manageable pieces so as enable you to implement positive changes to improve your health. Jo’s special sauce is her ability to facilitate bringing AIPers together in a way that is informed, inclusive and encouraging. Chronic illness doesn’t have to be isolating.

You can connect with Jo on her site, through her 30-day AIP Reset program, on Facebook and Instagram.

 

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 You have personal choices.

I suffered from an undiagnosed, painful and shameful skin disease for over 20 years – Hidradenitis Suppurativa  It was hugely isolating. I wish I had known at 20 what I know now about making diet and lifestyle choices that serve me (and my health!). I wish I had known about Sarah back then, too.

The thing is, this chronic disease thing doesn’t happen overnight. It’s been in the making for a long time and is the result of a few factors. Some of these, like our genetics, are outside of our control. Others, like many of those diet and lifestyle choices I mentioned, we can control. And that means we can begin to do something about them. Today.

The Autoimmune Protocol provided me with the template to transform my hideous skin condition from a debilitating affliction to something that is almost in complete remission. And, this transformation has been profound. Life changing, even.

What it hasn’t been is easy.

AIP takes work. It also takes time. And, it takes a significant shift in perspective. After 5 years, I remain a work in progress but, I’m committed to living an AIP way of life. I want to be a healthy old person.

What I know for sure, after almost 50 years on this planet, and considerable experimenting with applying the tenets of AIP, is that we human beings find change challenging. We resist it. The status quo is our comfort zone. It’s what we know.

The Power of Personal Rituals

After much trial and error, I now overcome the challenges of applying good and lasting changes to my life by stealth. I focus on making small, incremental changes over time. This is a gradual process. I’m sneaky about it.

I do this by constantly looking for ways to introduce new rituals to support my AIP way of life. That is – creating behaviours that support my ultimate goal of being a healthy old person.

After half a decade, it is easy to look at my health now and overlook the huge value in making these small, incremental improvements. I’m not aiming for a specific outcome. Rather, I’m working towards my goal of becoming a healthy old(er) person.

James Clear suggests we think of good habits as bankers think of compound interest. Just as your money grows with interest in the bank, so too do your good habits and rituals multiply as you bed them down into your daily life.

When following an AIP way of life, it can be very easy to dismiss compounded positive changes made over time as things that don’t matter. In fact, as human beings, we’re kind of wired to overlook them and to focus on the times that we slip up. But, it is those very personal daily rituals that will facilitate the greatest change in our health over time.

Want to know some of my personal rituals that have helped in my healing caper?

• Keeping a food and mood journal
• Aiming for 8+ serves of vegetables every day
• Making a Soup Equation soup every week
• Setting my bedtime and sticking to it. Religiously
• Creating monthly personal goals to keep me on track
• Committing to a daily mindfulness practice. When all else fails, my favourite is a combination of legs-up-the-wall  and creative visualisation. I have a standing commitment scheduled in my diary.
• Creating a personal morning ritual.

How to Create Your Personal Morning Ritual

Of all the personal rituals I have created during the course of developing my AIP way of life, my personal morning ritual is the one that has brought me the most unexpected rewards.

I first created a personal morning ritual as a way to carve out some space for myself, first thing in the morning, before the pressures of life were allowed in. Back then, I had no idea the deep-rooted impact it would have on my health.

This morning ritual of self-care has proven to be so transformative it inspired me to design a mini eCourse to help you to ‘Create Your Personal Morning Ritual’. It’s a free video training series where I step you through all you need to establish your own personal morning ritual; to help you create space at the start of your day before all the external pressures are allowed in.

It turns out that Sarah has her own personal morning ritual, too! Along with the videos and downloads to step you through the training, Sarah pops in to share just how she starts her day… You will be in great company!

Please drop me a line at [email protected] to let me know how creating your personal morning ritual helps you. I’d love to hear from you!