Pretty much every article or book you read about healthy living and dieting will make some reference to water. Seemingly we don’t drink enough of it ..
And if you don’t drink enough water all sorts of things can go wrong.
This graphic highlights some of the reasons why water is so important:
I’ve always been a big of a “night owl”. Working in IT probably hasn’t helped, as it seems to be the “thing” for most people in the industry.
But sleep is important. I know that I’m not at my best if I don’t get enough of it. And more importantly than the actual number of hours I sleep, the quality of the sleep is key.
When I’m “on the road” I stay in hotels. Most of them have reasonable beds, while some have absolutely fantastic ones (sure, others are mediocre too!), but my bed at home is a disaster. I’ve been meaning to replace it for ages, but I just never got round to doing it. I’ve spent hours browsing catalogues of beds online and have probably been in every furniture shop in Carlow at some point. The problem with a lot of the beds on sale is that they’re either “cheap” looking or horrendously expensive.
Last week was one of those weeks when I decided it was time to sort out a few things that I’d been meaning to do for weeks, if not months. So I finally ordered a new bed a couple of days ago and hope to take delivery of it in the next few weeks.
I opted for a wooden bed frame made of American white oak. I like wood. And spending a few euro more to get something that is natural seems like a good investment:
I also ordered a mattress, as a good mattress is key. Some would argue that the mattress is more important than the frame, but personally I wanted to get a good quality frame as well.
You can spend literally thousands of Euro on a mattress, but I opted for one which will hopefully do the job, but doesn’t cost an absolute fortune. I don’t know much about mattresses, so I relied on the advice of the very helpful sales guy from beds.ie.
Being rather “large” I can’t skimp on either the frame or the mattress and I’ve had back problems for years. I basically managed to screwup my back when I was working in France and I’ve been having problems ever since. The extra weight I’m carrying around doesn’t help of course.
So hopefully in a few short weeks I’ll have a nice new bed and my sleep quality will improve!
Eating healthily is important. If you’re going to snack between meals then it should, in theory, be something relatively healthy.
Of course that’s easier to say than to do, so a service which makes that easier caught my attention.
Graze offers a subscription service for people who want to snack on tasty treats that are also healthy.
You can choose between nuts, dried fruit, dips, olives and seeds, flapjacks, cakes, popcorn and “natural treats”. While some of the items might not be obviously healthy the calory count is surprisingly low. Their brownies, for example, are only 120 calories, which is probably about half what you’d get normally.
The pricing is pretty attractive too, with a weekly delivery under £4 (including delivery)
The service is currently available in the UK and US, but not in Ireland, unfortunately.
Here’s an overview of how it works:
So
There are an ever growing number of apps and devices that can help track your every move, your every bite and how many calories you consume, burn etc.,
Unfortunately a lot of them are a pain in the neck to use. They require a lot of extra work from you in order for them to record everything accurately.
A new app is trying to break that mould.
Argus claims that it will track most of your activities quickly and easily, in many cases without any intervention:
Argus turns your iPhone into a sophisticated health and fitness device as it monitors and manages your activities, food, workouts, sleep, hydration, weight and vitals, helping you make sense of numerous biofeedback data points to reach your health goals and improve overall well-being.
Argus is designed to harness every aspect of mobile computing to monitor your lifestyle without compromising your privacy. Argus is engineered for minimal power consumption and run 24/7 in the background, however continued use of GPS running in the background can dramatically decrease battery life.
Main Features:
– Daily step counter and outdoor activity tracking
– Creates food diary of all your meals with Food Snapping
– Set daily Goals for steps, sleep time and hydration
– Observe trends over time with all variables to track wellness
– Create close friends list to share food photos and other data
– Uses Instant Fitness for your home Workouts
– Uses Sleep Time to monitor your sleep cycles
– Uses Instant Heart Rate to monitor your heart beats
– Built in support of third party wearable devices and health appsWith an intuitive, eye-catching interface, Argus allows you to get a snapshot of your daily activity. Time is organized in honey-comb structure that allow easy aggregation of your data and detailed views. You can tap once on a cell to get more information. You can tap and hold for 2 seconds to get the aggregated views of your inputs.
Have a look at their promotional video where they make it sound like the answer to all my prayers:
[youtube]http://youtu.be/YB4UddXj2sc[/youtube]
The app was released earlier this week and at the moment, while it is promising, doesn’t appear to offer support for that many other health apps apart from the withings scale and a couple of other devices I’m not familiar with.
Having said that the UI is really nice and I’ll be testing some of its other features over the coming days (time permitting)
While a lot of us have very valid reasons to lose weight, others might feel that they should lose weight when it’s really not necessary.
Stereotypes don’t help ..
And one of the ultimate female stereotypes is, of course, Barbie.
So what if you actually took the Barbie doll and applied those proportions to create measurements?
The result is scary:
Maybe someone can do an action man version for us men? 🙂
While Ireland isn’t exactly renowned for its good weather, we have had reasonably good weather for the last few weeks with even a few days that could be considered “hot”.
You can eat salads all year round, but it’s definitely “easier” to do so during the summer months. Apart from anything else shops seems to stock more salad related ingredients and run more offers on fresh vegetables.
At this time of year I try to have salad most days. I say “most days”, as having salad every single day can get a little bit boring.
So varying the ingredients can help a lot!
The staples I use for the basis of most salads are:
Other ingredients will vary depending on what I have in the cupboards and fridge so I can end up adding things like:
What’s amazing about a good salad is how full it makes you feel, yet the calorie count (depending on the ingredients) is still quite low..
English: A photo of a cup of coffee. Esperanto: Taso de kafo. Français : Photo d’une tasse de caffé Español: Taza de café (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Good quality coffee is worth paying that little extra for.
Unfortunately most Irish supermarkets don’t stock much beyond the mass produced coffees from the big brands, so I usually pick up “nice” coffee when I’m travelling.
Luckily there are a growing number of specialised shops popping up in Irish towns and Carlow is no different. “Tea & Coffee World” in Carlow opened a few months ago and offers a very nice range of teas and coffees, including some very tasty flavoured coffee.
I’m currently drinking a nice mug of hazelnut coffee 🙂
