How To Set Your Baseline & Grow

The Thinking That Inspired Our Baseline Collection

• Your current physical fitness
• Your mental state and mood
• Your relationship with food
• Your connection with your body
• Your impact on those around you

The stories we repeat to ourselves around who we are, our limitations can be the biggest obstacles we face in creating our own change. Considering the baseline, and writing down how we are thinking, feeling and performing at any one time helps us to create a base for positive change.

Everyone’s Baseline Is Different

Crafting a new and improved you from your baseline does not need to entail a new gym membership, a juice cleanse, an 8-week challenge, a new fasting regime and cutting out all yummy food forever! You need to start small and with manageable, incremental changes with positivity at every stage. So, it’s important to set realistic goals that are not only realistic but achievable. When we achieve something, we feel good and this motivates us to keep going.

How To Set Your Baseline & Measure Change

Your Baseline Physical Fitness

This is where wearable technology can come in really handy. Things like a FitBit, Oura Ring or Apple Watch can help you set a baseline by measuring the steps you take every day, the calories you burn and even your resting heart rate. Only doing 3,000 steps a day? Aim for 5,000 or 10,000. A lot of them even track sleep which is super important.

Resting heartrate can be an incredible indicator of not only physical fitness but also recovery (generally the lower the better). If you don’t want to invest in technology like this most smart phones even have a step count on them these days. There are also handy apps like Strava that can help. Set up a challenge with a couple of friends and watch each other go! This is incredibly motivational and is completely flexible based on your fitness level. Start with a goal of 3-5km a day if that’s all you can manage. Marathon training? Start a group and see each others runs. We promise, it’ll spur you on more than you think!

Mental Health & State Of Mind

This one is a little harder to measure. Again, there are apps like ‘Moody’ that can help you by prompting you to track your moods (both positive and negative) on a daily basis to see how things change, both throughout the month and over time. Another simple way to track how you are feeling is to keep a journal or simply to try and take a moment out of your day to sit, relax, meditate and check in with yourself.

Your Relationship With Food

We’re not going to tell you to stop eating burgers and start drinking green juice. We’re also not going to tell you to start tracking your food and counting calories. Although this can be really effective and helpful, it isn’t sustainable for most long term. A more effective strategy can be trying to be more mindful around our food chooses and the food stories we tell ourselves. Our food beliefs have a huge impact on forming our decisions around what we eat. If we aren’t careful, we can develop toxic attitudes towards food which means we destroy our enjoyment of it. This in turn raises our stress (in particular cortisol) levels when we eat and actually means we absorb less energy from the food we’re eating. Rather than trying to stop eating ‘bad foods’ and thinking that ‘carbs are the devil’ we need to try and reframe how we think about food.

Food should be delicious fuel, give us amazing energy, a vessel for social occasions and enjoying time with friends and family. Start by writing down 1-3 x positive food goals for the week. It might be meal preparation, home-cooking at least 5 x per week, making sure you get 5 portions of veggies a day - and tick them off when you’ve achieved them. Pick new goals for the following week. 1 positive change a week is 52 small changes in a year!

Your Connection With Your Body

Everyone is a body builder… no, really. We should absolutely love everything we put in our bodies (because it helps to build everything from our muscles to our brain). If it doesn’t fill us with fuel, deliciousness and a little bit of joy we shouldn’t eat it. This might sound airy fairy but trying to tweak your eating habits to focus on the positivity of what you are eating can have a huge impact!

An easy way to improve on your baseline relationship with your body? Exercise – not because it makes you ‘lose weight’ or ‘get fit’ but because it actively improves your mood and helps you build respect for your body and the opportunities it gives you. Second – focus on YOUR body, not everybody else’s. Stop scrolling Instagram and exposing your brain to endless reems of photoshopped fitness models. At Rhind we use a total mixture of REAL women to model our clothes – for good reason!

Your Impact On Those Around You

How are your relationships? What do you bring to the people around you? Are there people that you struggle to get on with on a regular basis? Start by writing down the five people you are closest to – it is said we become the sum of these five people that we spend the most time with - and so these people matter! Then try extending the circle and write down another 5-10-20 names of the people you interact with most.

Take a look at these people and have a quick think about your relationship, whether it is positive, negative and how you serve each other. If it is positive write down what you love about that person and tell them! If it is neutral or negative ask yourself why and whether that negativity is coming from you or them. Are there easy changes you can make to reframe the relationship more positively? From here you can decide whether this is something you want to work on, or whether your relationship picture may look slightly better without their input next time you do it. How do you measure changes here? Repeat this exercise in a months’ time and see how your relationships have changed!

Inspired by our Baseline Collection…. We’re starting today.

Hop on over to @rhind__ on instagram and let me know!