Making changes can be tough.

If you’re working to change your diet to support the health of your microbiome, in line with The Good Skin Solution, it can sometimes be a real challenge to keep yourself on track!

To help you along the way, I’ve put together a simple four-step technique. It goes like this:

1.      Plan

2.      Record

3.      Assess

4.      Tweak

1. Plan. There’s no point in launching off down a path of change if you don’t plan ahead. Super-wealthy people have assistants to lay out everything they need and prepare mega-healthy meals for them. Sadly, we normals often lack that kind of deluxe support network, so we need to provide it for ourselves! You need to be your own producer. What that means is that you plan ahead and get everything set up in advance. If you don’t plan, I can guarantee what’s going to happen: you are going to get hungry and tired and grab the nearest and most convenient food choice, which is inevitably going to be full of microbiome-destroying, inflammation-causing, skin-wrecking rubbish. So, don’t let yourself get hungry! Instead, prepare. Plan out your meals. Plan out your shopping lists. Eat pre-emptively. This means eating at a certain time, that works well in your schedule, and filling up on healthy things before you get so starving and hangry that you grab that candy bar. We’ve all been there – now the job is to make sure you don’t go back! Prepare something to eat for lunch at work – and do it the night before, so you can grab it and go.

2. Record. Capturing the details of what you actually eat each day is a powerful act. The simple action of recording all your food choices in a food diary will create an amazing amount of change, all by itself. Bringing things to awareness is a high-performance act! I’ve created a food diary for you that gives you room to put what you plan to eat, as well as what you actually eat. Make your plan, and then write down what really happened. No guilt, no shame. Just record it, as if you were a detached observer.

3. Assess. This is where you compare the plan you made to the reality that you actually achieved. This is what we call the REALITY GAP. It’s the fibrous, gritty process that makes the difference between just sitting around dreaming about something and putting your boots on the road to make it a reality. Did you fall short? Great! Mistakes are how we learn and move ahead. Lean in to the assessment process. Pull it towards you like a gym. Work it like a muscle. Every day, taking a tiny step will take you a long way down the road towards your healthy, beautiful, glowing skin.

4. Tweak. This simply means that you look at what you did and figure out what you need to do differently tomorrow to get to the next level. Planning, recording, assessing and tweaking is an on-going process and you can use this process to improve any area of your life where you want to accomplish change. There is no judgement or blame here. Just a seamless, ongoing process of noticing what happened and then using it as a jumping-off point for the next stage of learning. You’re doing great!

As a congratulatory gift for engaging on the task of boot-strapping yourself into your own healthy future, we’ve put together a little 21-day health journal for you. You can download and print this out, and use it to plan, record, assess and tweak your health journey as you go.

Each day has an inspirational quote to get you going, the Good Skin Solution habit that you should be working for that day, a food diary to plan and record your food choices and a chart to keep track of how you’re doing every day: skin, tummy, mood, energy level, pain level, brain clarity, allergies, breathing and joints.

After you’ve been working with the Good Skin Solution for a while, these things will improve. You’ll want to look back on your progress to see exactly how things have changed. Natural healing works slowly and gradually over time, so it’s easy to lose track of these subtle positive changes unless you record them.

So, be your own case study. Become an expert of your own wellness. You’re the only one inside that skin – and you’re the only one who can heal it!

Good luck – and keep us posted on your journey. We’re right there with you!

Hugs,

Shann + the Goats

Shann is the co-founder and director of Chuckling Goat (www.chucklinggoat.co.uk). Her new book The Good Skin Solution: Natural Healing for Eczema, Psoriasis, Rosacea and Acne will be published by Hay House on 7 February, 2017. You can pre-order your copy here: https://www.chucklinggoat.co.uk/the-good-skin-solution/