25 Tips To Change Your Health Forever (New Years 2025 Challenge) || WBWL Ep 95

Just want to wish you a very Happy New Years and I hope that all your wishes come true…

Just kidding.

If indeed you want your goals to come true, you can’t just wish for them. You have to make things happen and take action.

Way too many of us contemplate change, we sometimes make changes in the first few weeks of the year, but then we lose steam and can’t seem to muster up the motivation or energy to stick to things long term.

If you’re admittedly saying “yes that’s me”, this episode provides 25 tips for the year 2025 to make sure you gain life long changes to your health forever. I even have a free downloadable guide that details all 25 tips here: https://flexwithdoctorjay.online/25-tips-for-2025

These are 25 things I actually employ in my own life, not out of some textbook. To create positive and meaningful results for yourself, it requires a different approach.

It will likely be the best under 25 minute episode you’ll listen to in all of 2025 :)

So let’s get after it! I’m excited to hear from you, email me at jason@flexwithdoctorjay.com to let me know which of these steps you will action! Pick at least 5 to start with out of the 25.

And if you found the episode helpful, please leave a review and 5 stars to support me. The more reviews, the more visible my podcast will be to those who could benefit.

To 2025 being YOUR year,

Dr. Jason Won

P.S. download the free guide here and listen to the episode at the same time: https://flexwithdoctorjay.online/25-tips-for-2025

Transcript

0:01

Welcome to the Won Body Won Life Podcast. Hi, I'm your host, Dr. Jason Won, Lifestyle Physical Therapist. As you guys know, it is New Year's Day, and I'm genuinely excited to share over 25 tips to make 2025 the year to change your health and life forever. I am somebody that I feel like I embody, not just physical therapy. but I also work just as hard in my own health and fitness. And I hope that I can inspire some of the things that have really helped me to change my health around from somebody that was a chronic insomniac to somebody that has had chronic neck and back issues and had a lot of my health go down the opposite direction. I do want to share with you how at the age of 36, what I'm currently doing right now, hopefully can share it with you in maybe less than 25 minutes, over 25 tips that I think will change your health and life forever. So the first 10 are going to be more so mindset strategies. The next 10 are going to be more actionable and concrete steps. And the last five are simply bonuses and icing on the cake. So I really hope that if you find this really helpful, please give it a thumbs up. Please for 2025 support my channel by leaving a five star review, leaving a review, and also sharing this with other people I think can really benefit from this. With that being said, let's go ahead and get it up to speed. And very first one, number one for New Year's Day is do not put your health last. We oftentimes will get really busy. We'll put our kids health first, but I think that when you can start to fill your cup up first and not pour from them to empty cup, I think that's just a mindset thing that I need to have is to really start to prioritize yourself more than any other, right? Self care is not selfish. So I think that's the first step that I want you to take. Number two, funny enough, start with just two minutes. I think that we get so carried away with doing a 30 minute or a 60 minute workout that sometimes we fail to realize that even just two minutes is better than zero minutes. So if you just simply set a timer, tell Alexa or tell Google to set a two minute timer and just simply start squatting. Simply start taking care of your body and incorporate more movements. I think that number two is really going to help you simply just remove the emotions and set a two minute timer and you'll start to realize that even two minutes starts to make you self feel good. Two minutes can progress into five minutes or simply enough. If you're too busy, settle with the two minutes and give yourself grace that two minutes was enough. Number three, remove emotions from action. We take too often, we feel overwhelmed and stress. And so sometimes that will deter us from working out or for eating right. And for doing things that are going to be healthy for us. And then what we end up doing is we eat junk food or we'll sleep in, or we'll sit on the couch and do Netflix. And that will just cause more stress and it causes more over when it causes more tension in our body. So if you can remove the emotions from actions and simply just say despite how I'm feeling, I'm just going to take some action, start exercising, just move my body that will actually make you feel better in the long run. So I try to always tell people remove the emotions. from the action itself and therefore just take the actions. Number four, write down your health goals and make it visible. So if you make it more visible, it serves as a constant reminder to you to take the actions necessary to change your health around. If you set this arbitrary goal, arbitrary is worse than specific. So if you could set a specific goal of I want to lift this much, I want to achieve 60 minutes of walking per day. That makes it more concrete, but at the same time, if you don't write it down and make it visible, then sometimes the minutiae and the trials and many other things that we go through in life. That will immediately distract us from the goal. So if you're constantly reminded daily, even if you say your goals out daily, or at least have it pinned in your bathroom or to the, or in your bedroom, it will serve as that constant visible reminder. Number five, creates little tiny action steps to achieving these goals, chunk it down. And so what this means is that sometimes. We create this like big vision for ourself health wise and the goal sometimes seems very lofty. Sometimes it seems so far away that sometimes we immediately start giving up by January and February. And that's very often what we see is that people start off going to the gym consistently and then there's crickets by February and March. I'm not saying go to the gym, but I'm saying that if you have a goal, maybe what you should do is try to chunk it down and create like little steps. Like January and February, I'm going to commit to doing this. March and April, I'm going to commit to doing this. You can start to layer in like strength training the first few months. Then you start to layer in maybe nutrition. Then you start to focus on your sleep. However you want to do it. Just, you Write out more concrete steps that makes it a little bit easier. So the analogy I like to use is a ladder. If the ladder has like these really big, like you have to overreach for the next. Point of the ladder, then sometimes you're not even going to reach for it. You're just going to give up. But if you create like little, small, tiny action steps, again, what I always say is little tiny action steps, that's going to make it just seem more achievable. Number six, tell a friend or partner or make it public. I've had a lot of my clients. I'm going to write it down on social media and I'm going to tell people what my goal is. This is my before picture or this is where I am now and watch me, watch me do my thing. And it's almost like you can have a naysayer mentality where you're trying to prove those people wrong. But it's Maybe also in just terms of accountability, if you tell a friend, tell a spouse, or maybe you write it down and you give it to them as a contract, or again, you write it down, these other people are going to be cheering you on or they're going to keep you accountable. So I can't stress it enough. How important that is that sometimes when you feel like you've relied on yourself for so long and you feel isolated and maybe you've Maybe you failed your goals year after year, it's a said, try something different, make it visible and make it public number seven, make sedentary activities less attractive. So this is coming from a book by James clear called atomic habits. And if you have certain activities that you do that are negatively impacting your health, then try to make it less attractive. Funny enough, you can. If you put like the remote control and you take the batteries out and you put the batteries in the basement and then you put the remote in the, for example, the closet, you'll be surprised that you start to watch TV a lot less, right? It's okay to watch TV once in a while, but to watch it for, sometimes 3 to 5 hours a day. You know that negatively impacts your health, your vision makes you more sedentary. So that's just an example of making sedentary activities less attractive. Number eight, make movement activities more attractive and more convenient. So is there a a Lululemon or a certain type of clothing that you've been eyeing that you feel like, man, like I wish I had that. If you start to grab more clothing that is more sedentary, You start to change your identity to an extent. You're like, man, I really feel good in this clothes. It actually might actually spur on more actionable things where you're going to start to become more fit. You're going to work out more because you bought that thing that makes you feel more attractive. Or at the same time, you can make things more convenient. So if you put a dumbbell. in your office, you may just take a break and start lifting that dumbbell up and down. So making things more convenient is really key for my practice for my own health. But I've actually told a lot of my clients, replace your desk plan and put a foam roll and a kettlebell At the office, which is literally sitting right by my feet right now. So when I end this episode, I am going to grab those things and actually start utilizing it. Number nine, reward yourself for consistency. So I think we sometimes maybe really slave away at, doing the thing and maybe we stay consistent for a while, but we don't reward ourselves for consistency. That's again, it's like telling a kid like, Oh, you get good grades, just keep getting them instead of taking them out for ice cream or, rewarding themselves, rewarding them in some way or form, getting them a toy. So also don't discount the fact that rewards really make a difference. So if at the end of a hard day, you like eat one scoop of, no, I wouldn't say one scoop, but even one spoonful of ice cream, maybe your husband or spouse takes you for a dinner. If you've Lost a certain amount of weight, or if you stay consistent, those things really go a long way. Number 10, stop saying I'm busy, or I don't have time. You simply just got to make time. This is a mindset thing that's sometimes one of the hardest thing to do, is to make time for what is truly important. Because, if you don't make time now to work out, or to start eating healthier, Then you're going to make time for disease and dysfunction down the line. So I really implore you to think about making the time and not using those excuses left for I'm busy. And like I said, going back to the remove emotion from actions, we sometimes are busy. We're tired because we're taking care of the many things in our life. But again, really makes sense of that, that if you pour for an empty cup, or if your health is going down the drain, you're going to make time for. Hospitalization and other things down the line, right? And that's going to be more costly in the long run. All right. So that was my first 10 mindset tips. Let's go through some actionable concrete steps. So the next 10 are going to be things that you can actually incorporate. Into your life now. So 11 strength train two to five days per week, bare minimum. If it's two days, upper body, lower body, if it's three days, you can do upper body, push, pull, and then the leg day, right? If it's four days a week, you can start to incorporate some cardio along with that, or you can start to separate things into body parts. So strength training is one of the most potent things for longevity, pain relief, feeling better, feeling more energized, having a better looking body. The list goes on, right? You, when you have more muscle mass, you literally live longer and you live a more fulfilling life. 12 drink half your body weight in ounces of water, right? So water, our muscles are 80 percent composed of water. Our body relies on water when are dehydrated. We are more or weaker. We're more tired. And sometimes we rely on coffee and energy drinks, and that creates a whole lot of other gut issues and fatigue issues. And sometimes it starts to wean off. So start to drink more water is really key. And I even have this half gallon. Actually, it's a full gallon. It's a full gallon that a lot of my friends and family make fun of, but I simply just fill up that full gallon every single day and I just drink the whole entire thing. So however you want to do it, grab a nice fancy tumbler, whatever you please, but try to get half your body weight an ounce of the water. 13 get a sits or stand desk frame. Or a walking pad or even both, right? So if you get a sit stand desk frame, I'm actually filming this podcast standing is that your body will feel better. We're generally more erect mammals. So when we sit, our body does get tighter. Our muscles and stuff. They tend to suffocate. We get less fluid exchange in our body and we tend to get sicker. As we're sitting at the desk, so if we can start to stand more, that's at least getting our hips and our lower back into extension is better for our spine, but even better is to get a walking pad, because that's going to aid with weight loss. That's going to get more movement in your pelvis and your lower back, and that's going to prevent a lot of other joints and chronic issues that can occur. So I have a walking pad by Rubromatic. I also have a stand desk, and I'm pretty much in this position good 68 hours a day. So 14 have a fallback routine. So this is when there are times where maybe plan a, which was workout, it was in your calendar, but for some odd reason, like you literally lost track of time and it's like really late. So having a fallback routine, like even just getting in 10 pushups, 10 squats, 10 cab raises, right? It's better than doing nothing. So having a fallback routine to create that consistency with strength training is something that I literally tell all my clients. Even for me, as a busy dad of two, I have a fallback routine. It's a composed of a hundred squats, a hundred pushups and a hundred cab raises. So I set the bar somewhat high. If I have more time, I'll actually add on another hundred of something, but my fallback routine still allows me to keep my body strong as I get older. And so if you don't have the time or capacity to do the 60 minute routine that you set yourself in the calendar, then you're Maybe you're like, Oh my God, like I feel guilty for not for writing this contract and I'm skipping the workout, have the fallback routine to still feel fulfilled and still feel like you're keeping yourself consistent. Okay. So 15 prioritize mobility before bed. This is really key because a lot of people wake up stiff. They think that their body is just aging, but the fact is that age is just relative to how you feel. And And chronological age is different from physiological age. So you might be 40 years of age, but you feel like you're 50, right? You're 40, but you feel like you're 80. The reason why is because you stopped moving. We stopped moving. We stopped exercising. So if we can, the last five to 10 minutes of bed is to at least get in some mobility. You stretch your spine, you stretch your hips. You're going to feel more rested. You're going to feel a little bit less stiff waking up. And I think that having that as a Has been something that I've been doing for over 10 years straight and has really helped me with my own neck and back issues that I had as a result of two car accidents, take a little deep breath. Let's go with number 16. Number 16 is eat more protein. Protein is the catalyst. It's broken down in amino acids. Amino acids helps with recovery from workouts. So some people don't see the gains they want, even though they're doing a ton of exercise, but if you start to eat way more protein, 0. 8 to 1 gram per pound of body weight, you're going to see visual differences. You're going to actually see noticeable gains. So understand this, something that I always say all the time is when you're strength training, You might look more swole, but you're actually breaking down muscle in the gym or during your workout. So if you're breaking down muscle, if you want to build muscle, you don't build muscle in the gym. You actually build muscle in your sleep and you build muscle by eating more protein. So build that muscle in the form of sleep, as well as in the kitchen where you're prioritizing more protein. If you're not getting enough protein in the form of meat, eggs, poultry, a number of other protein sources. Definitely. That's where you can get supplements, right? And I'm a sponsored athlete for legion. So that's generally my, my, my choice for protein supplementation. So if you are not getting the adequate amount of protein, definitely consider supplementation as well. 17. I already named it, alluded to it, sleep seven to nine hours. You sleep seven to nine hours, you feel more rested, cortisol secretion starts to get lower. You can remove cortisol and remove some of the things that are creating brain fog and concentration issues. So getting more sleep, it's literally it's free. You just got to actually discipline yourself to do it. So As a father of two, I try my best to get in seven to nine hours and I'm really prioritizing that. And that's really helped me optimize my fitness. My body feels a lot better and stronger and I look better. Number 18, add movement as a stress relief mechanism. There is a research study that I actually was a part of and It showed the differences between this cup right here where my hand is called positive coping mechanisms versus negative coping mechanisms. So negative coping mechanisms that they did research on, like actually like medical doctors and nurses. And what they show was that some health professionals or even, you yourself, when we're stressed, we will tend to try to grab junk food or we'll tend to, sit on the couch and watch Netflix. We make. poorer decisions when we're more tired and we're more stressed out. However, if you can almost dupe yourself into perceiving that movement is a stress relief mechanism, that not only is going to preserve your body more, but that is a positive coping mechanism. You're adding good stress. And what I mean by good stress is actually like lifting a dumbbell or lifting your body weight. Incorporating movement as a positive stress relief mechanism is something that you really have to just change your mindset around. Instead of grabbing for the cookies, you grab a dumbbell, right? Instead of grabbing for the ice cream or the remote control, you instead grab the foam roll first. Obviously, these things that I'm saying, I'm not demonizing. These things, I'm just saying like in excess, it's going to decay your body. So have those things where maybe you incorporate the foam rolling and the strength training first, and then you can therefore reward yourself with a Netflix episode. That sounds fair. So number 19, get more sunlight direct or indirect. So even for me, as I'm filming this episode, sometimes I'm stuck filming episodes. I've done a couple of podcasts guests as of today. So getting in this indirect sunlight still makes a difference. Sunlight is something that will help reset your sleep circadian rhythm. It's going to help you sleep more soundly. It's going to help with cholesterol as well, because cholesterol gets converted into vitamin vitamin D. And also then it also gets secreted as melatonin. So it really helps you if you ever realized that being outside in the sun and then going back inside, you sometimes feel sleepier and that's actually how it works. But yeah, obviously sunlight and moderation, but at the same time, most people in the world are stuck in an office and we're not getting enough sunlight as we need to. All right. So number 20 is to place workouts into your schedule at a specific time and date and make it non negotiable. So if you were meeting up with your wife or husband or girlfriend or boyfriend, or even a best friend, when you set the date to go to a restaurant with them, do you skip out on it? No, you don't. If you skip out on it, you're going to hear it from them, and they're going to cuss you out. Or they're gonna be like, why didn't you not show up? So if you don't do those things, if you don't skip dates with your friends, why would you skip dates with your workouts? Why would you skip dates with the healthy activities that you know you need to? So we set it for January 1st, 2025, 2025. at 3 p. m. I'm going to go for a run or a walk. Why should we skip it? Okay, so if it's in your calendar, it's tattooed into your body. It's tattooed into your schedule. Okay. So if you have it in your schedule, it makes it a non negotiable. I don't, I hopefully don't feel like if you put something at 3 PM that you simply move it to the next day, because that is the habit that we all do. We always skip the workout and we say, we're going to start tomorrow or start next Monday. Start today, start making a non negotiable, and I think you'll see vast differences in your life for 2025. All right, let's go through the last five, and then, I'm going to take a little deep breath, and hopefully you guys can start to incorporate some of these things as well. Number 21, have an all or some mentality. That is something that sounds really off. It's like, why have an all or some mentality, right? So the all or none mentality, though, is If you set a 60 minute workout for 3 p. m. today, January 1st. What happens if you get too busy or overwhelmed, you might actually just say, I'm going to skip the whole thing. So this kind of coincides with what I said about the fallback routine is that you could have a fallback routine where if you couldn't get to the gym, you can just simply do something at home. But if you still can go to the gym and you're like, Hey, instead of the seven exercises that I set for myself, I am simply going to do two to three of them and you'd be satisfied with that. Be satisfied. With the fact that you got in six to nine sets versus the full 18. If you got 25, 10 percent of it done, hallelujah, get something done. The law of consistency states that you keep sparking the fire. You keep igniting the fire. You skip days. The fire is going to run out, right? The fire is going to output and therefore you're going to lose that fire. You're going to fall off the wagon and maybe you might stay off the wagon, but if you just create the consistency, even have an all or some mentality. You're still going to get something done. You're still going to pat yourself on the back. And that's a huge part of consistency and making sure that you can, you can have a great 20, 25, 22 is just another way of saying it is like work towards consistency, not towards perfection. We sometimes strive for perfection. We strive to if I don't hit. that 10 pound weight loss goal. I'm unfulfilled. I feel guilty. I feel like a failure, right? It's all about failure and those failures. We say it enough that even if you do fail, failures are just lessons. Okay. You just learn from those failures, but work towards again, consistency. You never are going to have a perfect schedule six days a week. I'm pretty much in the gym, but there's times where I can't bring it. There's times where I can't get to the gym. So I go on the fallback routine. So I might be maybe 80 to 90%, like a grade on a scale of a hundred, but I'm satisfied with whatever grade I get, as long as I'm getting something done every single day, I feel very happy with the progress that I'm making and number 23, be proud of yourself at all stages of fitness. It sounds lofty, imagine the five year version of yourself where that five year version, it's you're clicking on all cylinders. Do you have good habits? You're eating, right? You're stressing less. You're sleeping more, your strength training more, and that's where you want to be, but still understand that like at every stage of the mountain, you're trying to traverse Mount Kilimanjaro, Mount Everest, and you're just like, dude, this seems so high, right? It seems I'll never get there. And maybe you're just like, wow, I'm still stuck at this one part of the mountain and sometimes people just fall off and just give up, but just be okay. Be okay. And give yourself grace, be proud of yourself at every stage of fitness. And in the long run, regardless of where you're at, whether you get to the top of the mountain and you create another mountain that you want to traverse or whether you're not there yet, just be proud of every single stage you're just working towards being a better version of yourself every single day. 24 be an outlier. I've always said to my clients that have a lot of like chronic pain issues. They have a lot of fatigue issues. And sometimes I'm like incorporate more movements. So becoming that outlier is saying to yourself that I'm going to be different from the rest of my peers. The rest of your peers may be drinking alcohol. They may be smoking. They may be partying. They may have a certain way of how they're living their life and how they're coping with their own stresses. But you want to be different, right? Be okay with being that outlier, whether they support you or not, you know that you're doing a good service to your own body. I know for a fact, and I'm sure a lot of my friends and people that know me, I strive. I really strive to be the outlier. I strive to be the person that just knocked out pushups wherever they want to. I knock out pushups in the kitchen. I do squats while I brushing my teeth. I work out seven days a week. These are what define me. I want to be the outlier. And that's what's going to help me to live a healthier, more fulfilling life and be free of pain, free of disease. And I want to do my best to always be there for my friends and family. Number 25, and I said this before in a lot of my podcasts, which is knowing your why sometimes it's hard to take actions when sometimes your goals and sometimes your actions are so superficial, maybe you just want a six pack, but does it go beyond that? What is your reason for why you're starting this health journey in 2025? And when you can ask yourself why multiple times you ask, like, why am I trying to be healthier? Why I'm trying to do this. Maybe you answer those questions and you say I want to be healthier because I want to be there for my family. Okay. Ask yourself why again, why do you want to be there for your family? Now, why do you want to live longer? Why do you love your kids so much? You start to just peel the layers of the onion that the why becomes so prominent and become so pronounced that it puts you to tears. And when you, when I think about my own kids, sometimes I can just make myself tear up about it. Like I really. Want to be healthier for my wife, my kids, the people around me. I want to inspire thousands of people to be healthier. And that really gets me to an emotional state that really compels me to action. And I don't want you to take this as a contrast on when I said, remove emotions from action, which was tip number three, rewind this episode. But sometimes you actually do need the actions, the positive. Actions, the positive emotions, the emotions that do compel you to tears. And sometimes you need that. Sometimes you feel isolated. Sometimes it's hard for you to muster up the energy to do a workout or to be healthier, but just remember that, you have a strong sense of why you have a strong sense of purpose, whatever that purpose is. Is I want to be healthier because of blank, whether it's a person, a endeavor, something that's so deep and meaningful to you, find out why, write it down, tattoo it into your brain and start to make the changes in 2025. So those are my 25 tips. I don't know if I'm going to do 26 tips in 2026, but I really hope that this episode really just gives you a sense of motivation, a sense of discipline, a sense of resurgence to really be a better version of yourself. And so if you found this episode, super helpful in 2025, I'm trying to reach as many people as possible. So I definitely implore you to leave a five star review. Google, Spotify, podcast, YouTube there's a lot of places that you can leave a review about the OneBodyOneLife podcast. The more people that leave a five star review or even write something that's meaningful, the more people that I get to reach and I get to impact more people's lives. So I definitely appreciate. Leaving a review. If you have any feedback for me or, future episodes that you want to see, email me, jason@flexwithdoctorjay.Com. You can follow me on many different places. I'm going to be posting a lot more in YouTube, a lot of different tutorials. So I really hope that you can be on the journey with me. And I really hope again, that this episode inspires you to make change. So that's what I got for you today. I'll leave you with a quote that I always leave all my audience. We only have one body, one life. Make every action you take be one that makes you a better version of you. Take care and have a beautiful 2025. Take care.