Have you lost your fitness mojo, your health mojo, or your everything mojo?!

Quite a few of us have or did over lockdown. And for a while it was sort of almost fine, wasn't it? We were coping with a difficult situation, weren’t we. And many people are now starting to think, ‘okay, clearly we are having to live in this new world’ - so now it is time to get that mojo back because you do not want to be feeling anything less than sparkly, for the next however many years you want to get that sparkle back.

Certainly, I do, because I lost a little bit of my mojo.

Where did your mojo go and what can you do about it?

🛌  Sleep

The first thing that went out of the window was a proper routine and for many people, their sleep started to suffer. They stopped going to bed at the same time that they used to go to bed. They went to bed much later and then maybe they got up later. What was a normal sleep pattern for us before became an abnormal sleep pattern? When you change your sleep pattern, this has an effect on how hungry you are and how much concentration you have, and how sparkly you feel.

Have a look at your bedtime hygiene, your sleep hygiene, and ask yourself is it time to get back into a better routine and try to go to bed at the same time every night.

One of the top tips that I often give people in this situation is to put yourself to bed like a toddler. In the summer try and give yourself lower lighting by turn down the bright light, have a warm drink before you go to bed. Try and turn down all the external noise that we are exposed to, and if you have fallen into the habit, avoid scrolling through social media when you are in bed at night.

 🍷 Alcohol

Another thing that can help us lose our mojo quite easily has been alcohol. Is wine, o'clock a regular thing every night of the week or too many nights of the week for you?

Although initially, alcohol makes you feel a bit livelier, the ongoing effect of more than is comfortable or healthy for us, is that it is quite a depressant and can suppressant your mood.

It also tends to make you hungry and so piles on the calories, not just from the alcohol but the food you eat with it. Therefore, it has a negative effect in all sorts of ways beyond that first couple of minutes of feeling good about it.

So, have a look critically at how much alcohol you are drinking over a seven-day period and think, do I need to make some changes? Don’t be too hard on yourself and make sure you make the changes that are right for you.

🍏 Food

The same goes for food. During lockdown, it was very easy for everyone with constant access to the fridge, and more time to make cakes and other lovely things to eat. I am not going to be mean and say those nice treats need to go but is it time to be a little bit more mindful about our food.

What I like to say is have cake, and enjoy your cake, but make sure you make time to savour the cake, or the sourdough or treat that somebody has made. Have a think about where the ingredients have come from, taste each mouthful slowly, rather than inhaling your food in a way that your brain does not even register you have had it. Have a look at the number of calories on your plate and look to see if you to make some changes.

💪🏼 Fitness

What about good fitness? I know a lot of people converted to online fitness throughout lockdown; they did YouTube videos and followed all sorts of new things. With the return to normality the live element of online fitness is missing, that person pushing you a bit harder, encouraging you to use a heavier weight or correcting your style is not there anymore.

Our body is designed to get to a certain level of fitness, and then it needs to be challenged in different ways. So, having a variety of types of fitness that you try and do throughout your week, is an important way for us to not either plateau or for our fitness to start tailing off.

📚 Rest

I heard a good podcast the other day about meaningful rest and advising how, even if you do not get very much holiday time, you can obtain that quality rest that our body requires. Our requirement to take a Spa break or a week's holiday is for the rest element, not because we just want to go somewhere else.

If we can embrace the idea of creating the opportunity to have 10 minutes of silence a day, our requirement for that complete rest will decrease because we are recognising that we need almost a mini-holiday every single day.

If you work in an office, pop out to your car, and sit quietly concentrating on your breathing, this can switch you off completely. Even in a stressful job situation, 10 minutes is enough to get you to go back with renewed vigour, excitement and clarity of thinking as well.

I hope that some of these tips help you to realise what you need to focus on to get your mojo back.

Obviously, my passion is the fitness element of that mojo and help you make healthier and more sensible lifestyle choices. I am still delivering online fitness every single week to people just like you who have decided to make some changes to they can be 

• as fit as they want to be
• can keep up with their grandchildren
• get a pair of shoes from under the bed
• feel comfortable in their clothes again

So , what are you going to change?

Because until you change something, nothing is going to be any different. Start looking at your food, start looking at your sleep. Plan to get out and walk every day. Get back to doing some fitness, or come and do some fitness with me.

And if you'd like my support on this journey - take a look at my menopause support programme Move Over Menopause which truly will help you rediscover your lost mojo!