New Year’s Resolution: Three Tips For Organizing Your Garage

Posted on by Christina Rasmuson

If you are like many other garage owners, your space is so cluttered there is no way you could think about parking your car in there. The thought of cleaning a space, such as this, can be a daunting one. This is why, when faced with a task like this, it is best to go at it with a plan. Here are some tips for organizing your garage.

Create a plan

The first thing you want to do is actually get into it. As Newton’s laws of physics state, an object in motion tends to stay in motion. Once you start the motivation to finish will help out. Start by coming up with a plan of action. Break it down into little task, maybe start with a corner and work your way outward. By breaking it into little task, organizing your garage seems more manageable.

Make piles

Start sorting your items into different piles. One for things you will keep, another for things that can be sold or donated, and a third for stuff you can just toss out. This will let you know what needs to go back into the garage and what doesn’t need to be there anymore.

Look into self-storage

Once the piles are sorted, and you find that you still don’t have enough space to park your car in its home, you might want to start looking into self-storage. Self-storage can help you keep things important to you, without the cluttering up your home or garage.

New Year, New You: Nutritional Tips To Help You Conquer The New Year

Posted on by Christina Rasmuson

Now that we are a few weeks into the New Year, you might see that your new year’s resolutions have started to slip. If being healthy is your goal, nutrition and fitness are your friends. Going on a diet isn’t necessarily what you need to do; rather you should learn how to incorporate healthy food, while removing junk in your everyday. It shouldn’t be a set time period, rather a lifestyle change. Here are some healthy tips to keep you on track.

Cut Out Sugary Drinks

Sugar doesn’t have to be your enemy, but consuming too much on a daily basis is going to have a negative impact on your health. Drinking soda and juice is the biggest culprit of this. By consuming these beverages, you are putting empty calories into your diet. They have little to no nutritional value and can actually make you crave more sugar.

Keep Track Of What You Are Consuming

The best way to know where your diet is suffering is to keep a food diary. This can help keep your accountable for the stuff you are putting in your body. Once you have the nutritional value of everything laid out on paper, you can see the areas that need to change.

If you don’t like the old fashion method of paper, there are a number of different apps you can download on your phone to help you keep track of this. These apps will automatically add all your nutrients together and give you an idea of where you are at. You can also set goal for fat intake, calorie intake, etc.

Drink Water

We all need water to live. In fact more than 70% of our body is made of water. Yet most people fail to hydrate properly. Drinking water throughout the day can help keep you hydrated and healthy. Proper hydration can curve hunger, and make you feel better all around. Keeping a refillable water bottle on you all day is the best way to have water on you at all times.

Snack Healthy

It’s three in the afternoon, and you are feeling a little hungry. You try to find something quick to eat to fill the time before dinner. What you grab at this moment is going to have a major impact on your diet. Chips and cookies are an easy snack that you can eat on the go; however they aren’t going to do you any favors. They are going to make you feel sluggish and regretful. Instead try grabbing a quick fruit or vegetable. Fruit can give you that sugar rush without having to feel guilty about eating it.

Changing your bad habits is going to be hard and take time, but if you keep trying it will get easier. Some of these steps are small and take less effort. They just have to become a habit for it to feel natural. Use these tips to make this year the year you actually find the new you, you have been looking for.

Setting Yourself Up For Failure: The New Year’s Resolution Trap

Posted on by Christina Rasmuson

As we quickly approach a new year, many people are taking the time to reevaluate their life. It’s a common time for us to come up with new goals that we wish to achieve to in the New Year. Many of us use this time of the year as a reason to completely makeover our life and become the person we have been wanting to. The New Year, new me mentality. However, we find that we tend to fail year after year. We set off on this new life for a few months or so, only to go back to our own ways shortly after. Here are some reasons you are setting yourself up for failure and how to correct that to achieve your goals this year.

Unrealistic Expectations

Most of us go about our goals with an entire U-turn of our life; jumping head first into these changes, without much of a thought. The problem with this is humans are resistant to change. Our brains are wired to keep doing the things we were doing over and over again. If we don’t take time to ease ourself into these huge changes it becomes difficult.

In order to create a change, we must first create new habits. To do this takes time, repeating the new action over and over again until it starts to be something your brain knows and wants to do. For example if you want to change your eating habits, a crash diet isn’t going to cut it. The best course of action is changing your diet long term. You can eat bad stuff; you just have to eat it less. If most of the days in the week you are eating healthy, a junk day isn’t going to be an issue. If you are eating junk 6 days out of the week, this is where the issue comes in. Moderation is key.

Some ways to ease yourself into this is adding more fruits and veggies to your diet. Increase your water intake over the next few weeks, while cutting out soda and juice. Eating clean protein with every meal is going to help as well. As time goes on you will find that these things get easier to add, while taking out the bad stuff.

You Burned Yourself Out

The best way to fail a New Year’s resolution is by going too hard, too fast. By the end of the first month you just want to take a little rest, but end up falling back into your old habits. Once that happens it’s hard to start back up and you end up putting it off for a whole year again.

Say you want to go to start going to the gym. You don’t want to start going to the gym every day for a week and burn yourself out. By the time the next week comes around you are going to be burned out. Ease yourself into a going every other day or even just on the weekends. Start off slow. Get your body used to moving, and then you can start to increase the amount of exercise you do a week. Once it becomes a habit, going to the gym 5 days a week should be easy

You Doubt Yourself

After setting out on your goals you start to think that it’s too hard. You don’t give yourself enough time for a change to actually show. At this time you start thinking it impossible and too hard to accomplish. Failing back into old habits is easier.

Everyone has doubts from time to time. When you rush into change and don’t see results right away, it can have an effect on your drive. And once doubt enters your mind it can take away all that motivation you had at the beginning. While you can’t always control the doubt, you can push through it.

Be realistic when setting your goals. Know what to expect and find a way to push through the doubts. Don’t let them rule your mind. Motivation is going to help you start, but you need persistence to keep going.

New Year’s is a great time to take a look at the things you want to change. It’s like opening a new chapter with new possibilities. But change takes time and the best way to go about it, is to ease yourself into these changes. You don’t want to jump head first into your new goals. That is only setting you up for failure. Give yourself time to create new habits and you will finally see your New Year’s resolutions come to fruition.