Wellness Wednesday Issue #182

🛡️ When something’s off at work and everyone freezes, bystander intervention training gives your team four ways to step in safely.

🌿 When stress won’t switch off, learn to reset your vagus nerve.

🎆 Your Fourth of July work party called and it wants to be more than a sad sheet cake this year.

🚶‍♀️ Turns out one longer walk beats several short ones for your heart.

The week gets away from you fast. Lunch becomes a granola bar. Dinner becomes whatever’s easiest. By Thursday you’re running on caffeine and good intentions, and you feel it everywhere: foggy brain, low energy, that 3 p.m. slump that no amount of coffee can fix.

Here’s what’s actually going on: when you’re not eating enough protein and fiber together, your blood sugar spikes and crashes all day. Those two nutrients slow digestion, stabilize your energy, and keep you full long enough to actually get through your calendar.

The meals below do that without asking a lot of you. Under 30 minutes, easy to prep ahead, and good enough that you’ll actually want to eat them.

Chicken and Black Bean Burrito Bowls

Rotisserie chicken, canned black beans, a microwavable brown rice packet, salsa, and greens. That’s it. Black beans bring about 15 grams of fiber per cup, and the chicken carries the protein. Make the components Sunday and assemble all week.

Egg and Lentil Scramble

Lentils don’t get enough credit. They’re cheap, fast, and pack around 16 grams of fiber per cup. Scramble two eggs with a half cup of cooked lentils, garlic, and whatever greens are about to go bad in your fridge. Works for breakfast, dinner, or the 11 a.m. moment when you realize you forgot to eat. It takes under 10 minutes start to finish.

Greek Yogurt Power Bowl

Five minutes, no cooking required. Layer plain Greek yogurt with chia seeds, raspberries, and high-protein granola. Raspberries alone bring about 8 grams of fiber per cup, and the yogurt handles the protein side of things. The whole bowl clocks in at 30+ grams of protein and doesn’t taste like a punishment.

White Bean and Veggie Soup

Make one pot Sunday, eat it until Wednesday, freeze the rest. Sauté onion and garlic, add canned white beans, canned tomatoes, whatever vegetables you have, and broth. Simmer. White beans give you about 17 grams of protein and 11 grams of fiber per cup, and the flavor only gets better the next day.

Tuna and Chickpea Salad

One bowl, five minutes, no heat. Mix canned tuna with chickpeas, lemon juice, olive oil, and whatever herbs you have. Eat it over greens, in a wrap, or with crackers. Chickpeas bring 12 grams of fiber per cup and hold up next to tuna without overpowering it.

Kodiak Banana Bread

This one earns a spot because it tastes like a treat and functions like a meal. Kodiak Cakes mix is made with whole wheat and whey protein, so a slice comes out to about 11 grams of protein and 4 grams of fiber. It takes about an hour total, most of which is bake time. Make it Sunday, slice it, and grab a piece before every meeting that’s going to run long.

That’s it! You don’t need a full overhaul. Rotate two or three of these into your week and notice how different you feel by Friday.

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Outside of writing for The Assist, I work as a marketing consultant with female small business owners, startups, and organizations on communications, storytelling, and marketing. So I see a lot of the same problem from a lot of different people.

Someone has a product with real potential. They throw it into ChatGPT or a Canva AI template or some other tool, expecting magic. What comes out looks like… AI made it. It’s generic, off-brand, and ultimately, forgettable. The product deserved better, and the AI just didn’t have what it needed to make it good.

This is what I mean when I say AI slop, and most of us are producing it without realizing it.

Here’s how to create templates — a digital product, a piece of collateral, a worksheet, a lead magnet — in a way that doesn’t embarrass you or your brand. This works whether you’re a small business owner or someone inside a corporation who’s constantly cranking out handouts and one-pagers. It’s a repeatable process that scales across any industry and any role.

The Rule: Human First, AI Second

The biggest mistake people make is starting with AI. The second biggest is assuming that because they have access to Claude or ChatGPT, they’re equipped to let it run. Most of us aren’t. And that’s not an insult, it’s just where we actually are. Properly prompting AI for creative design is a refined skill, and most people haven’t built it yet. So until you have, here’s a process that works.

Step 1: Wireframe It on Paper

Before you open any software, pick up a pen, and sketch where the title goes, the images live, and the fill-in-the-blank sections are.

You’re not designing yet, you’re thinking. This is the step most people skip, and it’s why their final product feels all over the place.

Step 2: Collect Everything That Needs to Go In It

Answer these three questions before you touch a template:

• Who does this need to serve?

• What information needs to be on it?

• What’s the goal — a sale, educate, inform, a CTA?

If you can’t answer all three before you start building, you’re not ready to build yet.

Step 3: Find a Real Design

This is where I’m going to push back on the shortcut. Unless you’re a competent AI prompt engineer, don’t let Claude or ChatGPT design your template from scratch. The output won’t look like your brand, and it’ll look like everyone else’s.

Instead, go to Creative Market and spend the $12–20 on a template that’s already well-designed. Search for what you need — “webinar worksheet,” “lead magnet PDF,” “fillable workbook” — pick one with the visual structure you want, and adapt it to your brand colors and fonts.

What you can do with AI at this stage: feed it your existing design (a PDF, a screenshot, a past piece), and ask it to build your new thing within those visual parameters. That’s using AI as a tool. Starting from a blank prompt and hoping for the best is not.

Step 4: Build Your V1 by Hand

Take your wireframe from Step 1, your content from Step 2, and your template from Step 3, and build it yourself. Fill in the copy. Place the images. Put it together. This V1 won’t be perfect, and it’s not supposed to be.

Step 5: Use AI to Optimize Your V2

Now bring in Claude or ChatGPT. Drop in your V1 PDF and ask it to analyze the content and layout, flag what’s not working, and suggest improvements. Go back and forth until you like what you have. If you’re more advanced with AI, you can ask it to take the current design and improve it directly. Either way, this is where AI earns its place. As a second set of eyes, not the first.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Say you want to create a worksheet to accompany your next webinar. Here’s the exact process:

Step 1: Grab a piece of paper. Draw where the title goes, where the fill-in-the-blank sections go, where the images land on the page.

Step 2: Open your webinar outline. Which sections does the worksheet need to support? What are the key ideas someone should be writing down and walking away with? Does it need supplemental links or resources?

Step 3: Go to Creative Market and search “webinar worksheet” or “fill-in-the-blank worksheet.” Something like this workbook template is a solid starting point. Take the pages you like and adapt them to your brand.

Step 4: Drop all the copy and content from Step 2 into the format you found in Step 3.

Step 5: Put the whole thing into Claude or ChatGPT. Ask it to analyze the PDF and give you feedback on the content and the layout. Ask for suggested improvements.

Step 6: Implement what resonates, leave what doesn’t, and make the final edits yourself in the design template.

Why This Works When AI Alone Doesn’t

We’re already in an era where consumers are reacting against AI-generated content. They can feel it: the generic structure, the language that sounds like it was written by a product description from nowhere, the design that looks like a template no one actually touched. The people who lead with human instinct and use AI to refine will consistently outperform the ones who start with a blank prompt and hope.

Don’t be afraid to do it ‘old school’. Build it yourself first, then use AI to make it better.

Thania (TA Content Mgr)

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🐾 Joanna swears by this collapsible dog water bottle for long hikes.

🧇 Blend this protein powder with blueberries to make delightful high-protein waffles.

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👩‍🍳 Recipe of the Week: Crispy Golden Air Fryer Chicken Tenderloins.

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