Google Fit app review: a free and excellent fitness tracker

If there's one piece of technology that has really exploded in popularity in recent years, it has to be fitness trackers. As recent as 3 years ago wearing devices around your wrist, clipped to your clothing was a niche market. At the same time, using phone app to track your runs or rides were common for enthusiasts and competitors, but the average person didn't care all that much. Since then however, it's difficult to be in a public place, a shopping centre, office, or busy pedestrian street without spotting many a lot of these devices on people's wrists.

Activity trackers likes Fitbits were among the most popular holiday gifts for the last couple of years. Whether it's dedicated devices or specific apps, it's become incredibly common, extremely easy and debatably useful for people track their steps, weight, distance travelled, energy burned and overall physical activity in pursuit of better health and well being. There are so many options with a wide range of features, form factors and price points, but if you're just starting out and testing the waters, Google Fit may be what you're looking for.

Google Fit is an activity tracker created and managed by Google, in the same vain as Gmail, Google Photos, and Google Calendar. Like all other Google Apps, Google Fit is at its core, web-based which means all information is stored and sorted on Google’s services and therefore accessible across all internet connected devices. Google Fit’s ability to automatically track steps, distance and all other typical use-case information, requires your phone to run Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) if the phone itself is going to be the primary tracker. The Android OS version shouldn’t be a worry as over 90% of all Android devices run at least 4.0 - if you have an Android device younger than 5 years, you should be good.

What Google Fit does

Google Fit is an app which tracks all of the basic markers of physical activity - steps, distance, active time and energy burned. It also allows you enter goals for each on a daily or weekly basis, and enter your weight measurements. The ring is usually the first graphic you see which fills as you build your activity each day with different colours differentiating between different information. The app is able to intelligently distinguish between walking and running, so if you forget to identifying a run, it will still log your steps, energy and the rest as your pace picks up. It's needy, but fun, to go back and find out that it identified those times you quickly scurried across the road or ran around the yard with the dog for a few minutes. Of course, for deliberate workouts, you can select your activity from a massive list (A-Z, Aerobics to Zumba) and the app will smartly configure energy burning, steps and active time for you. You can also enter an activity afterwards - in case you forgot or didn’t have your phone, or any tracking device on you at the time of your workout.

Google Fit then sorts all of this information and presents it to you in real time and with next to no effort. Simple rings and bars show progress, icons are clear and the overall interface make scrolling through past activities, entering new data, changing settings or viewing progress trends easy and fast. The app is designed incredibly cleanly and refrains from bombarding you with menus, options and other elements that could create a cluttered and distracting user experience. Everything you could want to see is incredibly easy to find.

Google Fit is free and available everywhere

The best things about Google Fit are it's price and availability. As alluded to before, like most Google services it is entirely free and accessible anywhere. Download the app to your Android phone, spend 5 seconds activating it and you're good to go. There's no need to turn it on or off when you want to use it, once you're setup it just just keeps working. I am pretty deliberate with tracking my activity, it's fun for me, so I'm always looking at the app on my phone, or on my laptop (fit.google.com) to see how things are going. My wife doesn't care so much, but does like to see from time to time. She remembers her phone does this maybe once a week and very simply she can get a solid idea of how active she's been over the last few days, weeks or months. Of course, this depends on your phone being on you, unless you have a tracker or smart watch.

The availability is where I find the most piece of mind. Apple Health requires an Apple device, there is now Web version, so if you one day move to Android or Windows phone and your history is locked within Apple's walls. As said before, Google Fit being available via a browser adds a greater layer of openness for the long term. It's so handy to be able to look at my activity on my phone, tablet and laptop, and it pulls from most other notable fitness trackers to combine everything in one place is incredible. The value increases exponentially as I'll still be able to do so when I upgrade all of those devices. IT should be noted however that synschornisation isn’t perfect - at least not in real-time. Below is a photo of the web-site screen, my tablet and phone and as you can see the information is close, but not exactly the same. Past results all seem to be consolidated, for example the logs are all identical as of 2 days ago and earlier, but real-time and the day before seem to be be slightly conflicting.

While the slight glitch in across-device consistency isn’t perfect, this flexibility is the greater plus. Maintaining a healthy lifestyle is forever, so if you're in the camp that finds value in activity tracking, being locked into whatever device you're using in a given moment, and the possibility of losing everything if and when you change to something else is a big deal. You may use a step counter now, then take up running next year and therefore want a different device made by a specific running brand like Polar, change phone makers 2 years later, and who knows what else in the decades to follow. It pains me that the biggest line, Fitbit is refusing to partner with Google (or Apple) on this. Fitbits are great, but on a  personal level I don't like services that are built to lock me in.

There's no iOS app yet

The unfortunate and frankly, un-Google aspect is that there currently is not iOS app. The Google Fit app is exclusive to Android, just like Apple’s version, HealthKit is exclusive to iOS. This means that iPhone users can use Google Fit to keep their records, but the phone’s sensors can’t feed into Google Fit directly. That being said, Google has allowed access to developers for anyone who chooses to use their APIs, which means that most of the well known fitness apps, Nike, Strava, Adidas, Withings, Runtastic, RunKeeper, and MapMyFitness can all synch to Google Fit. So, if you use Strava to track your bike rides, Nike+ to track your runs, plus want a place to log your weight each week, Google Fit can be your one-stop-shop. It is bothersome that Google Fit is not available on iOS. Google Apps are usually written for Apple devices (Gmail, Drive, Google Maps, Google Play Music and Google Photos are all on iOS), as Google’s model is built on allowing everyone to use their services, so Google Fit may be coming. Long story short, if you have an Android device, you’re all set, if not, you’ll need a fitness tracker otherwise you’ll be entering things manually.

Overall

Google Fit is a free application for logging and tracking your physical activity and workouts. There’s no iOS app yet, but you can still access the app via the website which is a very big advantage. This, plus the fact that it can link to almost all other fitness tracking devices (i.e., Withings, Runtastic, Strava, Nike+, RunKeeper, etc) means that your activity will stay with you regardless of what watch, phone, wristband, tablet or laptop you find yourself using as the years go on. And, given that maintaining an active and healthy lifestyle isn’t a temporary endeavour, the ability to keep tracking your workouts, if you find so beneficial, regardless of what watch, phone or wristband you’re using is incredible.

The link to the website is fit.google.com and you can find the

Android app here

How to exercise without exercising

There’s a misconception that exercise is based around explicit and unique activities. To one point, it’s understandable why someone would, in efforts to increase strength would approach weight machines and a rack of dumbbells as the best way to do it. If greater endurance is the goal, then something that you wouldn’t do for any other reason than to build endurance, like jogging, makes perfect sense. 

On the other hand, this mentality can create a barrier for some. Treating exercise as a specific task can make it seem more daunting, or difficult to work into a busy schedule. The idea that someone may have trouble finding time for 3-4 hours of working out each week isn’t all that difficult to grasp when juggling family, work and leisure. Dropping stationary bike in front of a TV, or turning a walking session into a chance to catch up with a friend are highly common and highly recommended ways of mitigating these challenges.

This idea of recontextualising exercise can be taken even further however. Removing the “specificity” from exercise and embracing the overall function and purpose of exercise - to move and challenge the body physically, allows people to live exercise filled lifestyles with minimal burdens on time and psychological commitment. If you can remember that anything where you’re lifting heavy things, pushing the heart rate up in short bursts, and moving frequently at slow paces, it’s much easier to exercise more, without exercises at all. Here are some idea:

Housework - cleaning, mowing, gardening, etc.

If the definition of exercise boils down to any activity to requiring physical effort, housework fits the bill perfectly. Vacuuming, sweeping, and mopping take time, get your heart pumping and depending on the size and layout of your house, can involve a lot of lifting of heavy buckets of water or vacuum cleaners up and down stairs or in and out of sinks or tubs.

Mowing the lawn, dumping the clippings and carrying around the edge trimmer can be so physically taxing of a workout, that the very nature of this task influences the type of houses people buy and where they choose to live. We always knew our fairly large yard took about two hours, but once we realised it also involved 6km of walking and over 9000 steps, it made mowing far less dreadful. It’s of course still a pain, but the simple psychological shift has allowed for greater motivation and has further improved the health of my body and property alike.

Whether it’s house cleaning, yard work or general repairs and renovations, embracing these activities as beneficial to your physical fitness is a fantastic way of not just exercising, but of getting things done. Two jobs that need to be done that can easily be too boring or time consuming to get done, are now covered simultaneously. Spend a couple hours turning soil and pulling weeds and you have a productive afternoon in a bit of nature and have a much improved garden. Spend the same amount of time, and physical exertion on an elliptical trainer and while it may have been a good workout, you have far less to show for it.

Playing with pets, kids, family, friends, etc.

Despite what conventional wisdom indicates, exercise isn’t about calories burned, but about movement. The concept of “calories in, calories out” is one so oversimplified, it’s borderline meaningless. While the basis for burning enough calories to offset the amount you take in is scientifically correct, the process by which calories, both in and out follow are far more complicated than needing to stay on a treadmill for a certain amount of time to work off that breakfast muffin.

In this light, the emphasis is again on frequent movement of various, spontaneous intensities integrated into your lifestyle. Among the best platforms for this, is play. While play is usually associated with children, it is undoubtedly one of the most time-tested and traditional cultural activities throughout history. Play gets incorrectly boxed in too strongly with physical activity and competition as its benefits go far beyond that, into the realms of creativity, competition, teamwork and many other psychological attributes applicable to everyday life. Stuart Brown, a psychologist who has dedicated decades to studying play’s beneficial properties to both personal therapy and business optimsation calls it a “profound biological process” and suggests that play continually shapes the human brain throughout our lifetime.

In his book Play: How it shapes the brain, opens the imagination and invigorates the soul, Dr Brown provides the evidence that, even though for adults taking time to play with our friends, kids, family and pets is taken as an unproductive guilty pleasure only possible on vacations, it is anything but trivial. Play is a biological drive as integral to our health and development as sleep or nutrition. This goes beyond the common knowledge around brain-teasing puzzles such as jigsaws, riddles, and board games and marries the neurological challenges with the physical, social and emotional aspects of development strengthening the way we parent, educate, work and govern all layers of society.

We all know how important it is to find time for fun during a busy work schedule, but rather than framing play as an unimportant luxury you’re just too busy or tired for, make it a priority. Organise some two-on-two basketball, splash around in the pool with your kids, or run and roll around with your dogs. Doing so, won’t just benefit your mood, but will add to the health, wellbeing and even the productivity of you and everyone else involved - though, how advantageous play is to pets’ productivity is still under examination.

Last week, I asked everyone following my Healthy Forever Google+ Collection whether they considered housework as exercise. To my pleasant susprise, close to 80% of the near 200 votes at the time said yes. The reality is, that trying to keep all aspects of life compartmentalised as singular activities is rarely possible. Broadening our approaches to life, and in this case our exercise, allows us to cover more ground with less time.

For the record, I enjoy the gym, most of the time, which is the same for just about all forms of exercise or physical activity there is. If you’re a gym-rat and love nothing more than setting up a different day of the week to specific isolated muscle groups, congratulations, that’s awesome. A lot of people though, go through phases depending on their other responsibilities, money, the weather or motivation levels and while committing to the weekend road run or crossfit twice a week is obviously an admirable endeavor, it’s important to understand that exercise comes in many forms and therefore, with the right approach, doesn’t have to be all that time restrictive.

Advice for Healthy New Year's Resolutions

It's easy to finish the year incredibly determined to start the next one off on the right foot. January is the busiest month for gym memberships. It shouldn’t be surprising that when it comes to New Year’s Resolutions, those relating to health and fitness represent the majority of declarations. Here are some of the more interesting statistics on New Year’s resolutions are taken from Details and Statisticbrain. Thankfully, the internet makes it pretty easy to request, gather, organise and analyse social data of this nature.:

• 45% of people make New Year's resolutions
• 1 in 3 people ditch theirs by the end January
• 2 in 3 people who make resolutions include health as a goal
• 73% give up before meeting their goal
• 21% resolve to lose weight and this is the most common resolution (improve finance and getting organised round out the top 3)

Why New Years makes for a such an appropriate time for prompting health and fitness changes makes a lot of sense. People like timelines and our brains function according to schedules, times and dates for substantial events. It's important however to remember that health and well being isn't a short term ideal. All the “new year new YOU!” motivation in the world doesn't mean much if it doesn't last but a couple of months. The star that burns brightest often burns out fastest. It would be great to lose 10kg in 10 weeks and just worry about the long term as it approaches, but without that big picture mindset, it'll be difficult to ever get where you truly want to be which is a self-sustaining long lasting lifestyle approach health and wellness.

It's not about being on a diet or losing weight as much as it is about being healthy. That being said, there aren't many times where turning over a new leaf by making some widespread goal orientated lifestyle changes is better sparked than the new year. Here are some things to keep in mind when putting together your New Year’s resolution.

New year, new you!

Some things may have to be drastic

Deciding on what aspects of your new lifestyle should be jumped into with both feet as opposed to a slow transition can be quite difficult. That being said, while easing into healthier eating or exercise may seem smoother and more comfortable, it’s important to respect the difficulties temptation and convenience bring to the table. WIll power is an area of academic study gaining a lot of attention lately. While willpower and determination are inherent traits which cannot be concretely quantifiable, there is an increasing body of psychological and sociological research discovering that willpower is limited in strength.

The American Psychological Association explains that willpower is like combination of skill and physical capacity. Willpower can be learned and developed the same way cardiovascular endurance, or reading efficiency can be improved as well. However, the most pertinent aspect of this is that willpower depletes as it is tested. In other words, the more temptations and conveniences you have around you, the more your reserves of willpower are taxed and your self-control weakened. Keeping sugary treats or coupons for fast food around increase the likelihood of broken diets in the short term and drastically weaken the long-term success of any healthy lifestyle change.

As uncomfortable or wasteful as it may seem, it therefore may be the best thing in the long term, to go through a dramatic kitchen cleanse and get rid of all highly processed, carb-rich foods, pre-packaged sugar sweets, and toxic convenience-meals and snacks. If you don’t see them, you don’t need to rely on self-control to not eat them.

Regarding exercise, the notion of self-control can also be aided by including others into your plans. The peer-pressure effect of obligation has shown to work wonders for helping people commit to their workout plans. Rather than rely on your own willpower to go to workout on your own, not wanting to bail on a friend or trainer, or waste a membership you’ve already paid for can be a powerful motivator.

Some things can be eased into

Where some things should be made drastic as discussed above, others should be eased into to prevent yourself from feeling bad for falling short. Missing a gym session isn’t really that detrimental if overall, you’ve been living a more active lifestyle by walking more, opting for the stairs rather than the elevator, and taking the kids to the park, and playing with them, rather than spending the afternoon in front of a screen.

Likewise, and this is a big one for me personally, healthy eating doesn’t have to be 100%. Christmas season just ended, which means there are plenty of people out there, that despite all the willpower in the world, practical circumstances made it near impossible to perfectly adhere to their usual healthy eating regimen. The same can be said for times of illness, emotional distress, the busy times at work, or any of the million other situations people find themselves in where they have less time, energy or motivation to exercise perfect discipline.

This means that, the goal, shouldn’t be to perfection or strictness with your new healthy lifestyle. When enjoying unhealthy holiday treats, or satisfying a fast food craving because of a crazy work period, do just that - enjoy it. Embrace the momentary lapse in wholesome living as just that - momentary - enjoy it, be mindful of what it means for your gut, temperament, energy levels and the rest of your body, and move on. Full awareness, no guilt. You’ll pick back up, when you can. It’s far too easy to let things go at the start of december with first offering of rum balls and shortbread, and to go from there, to a guilt-induced over-dramatic New Years resolution after 4 weeks of chocolate, cake and hot cocoa.

Tracking your activity and progress is handy, but there's not real finish line to healthy living.

Emphasise actions over results

While being goal-orientated is often a positive way to tackle new challenges, it’s important to remember that being fit and healthy doesn’t involve an end goal. Declarations such as “lose 10kg” may be a useful way to track and measure success, but the actions that bring that result about are what are more significant.

In other words, if “lose 10kg” or “fit into this size jeans” is the goal you have mind, it may lead to a lack of satisfaction or motivation once that goal is reached. Instead, frame your goals around the actions you want to make in the new year. Rather than run 5k, focus your motivation on running weekly. While bench pressing your body weight may be the ultimate check box you’re out to complete, improving or establishing a better chest routine may add a deeper angle to your workouts.

The main difference is in the approach. A smart and measurable goal makes it easier to judge success - am I swimming every week or not? Anyone with an organisational, logical or business-orientated mind can see obvious benefits in this. However, how absolute this approach is can cause motivational problems. After 3 weeks of missing your weekly swim, the logic that made the resolution so sound, actually adjusts to make bailing on the goal of hitting the pool every week seem more reasonable. There’s no point in telling yourself you’ll do something you just can’t at the moment because of work, illness, laziness or whatever other balls that spontaneously are added to those we have to juggle.

Instead, reframing the resolution to be more flexible, action-based and focused on the lifestyle change avoids these traps. A 3 week stint of not being able swim because of a hectic schedule isn’t as detrimental if the goal is simply to swim more often. While “swim more” may sound vague, and harder to track, than “swim 30 minutes each week”, it definitely allows for more an open ended pursuit of a healthier lifestyle. At its simplest angle, unless you’re perhaps a competitive swimmer, or signing up for a charity team-triathlon, warranting a dedicated swimming program, any measurable benchmark may be irrelevant. For the average person, the overall goal isn’t to swim every week, it probably isn’t even to swim more, but is really just to be more active, and stay more active for an undetermined amount of time - as long as possible. Focusing your attention on the action, may allow you to forget about the measurable checkboxes and instead make the balanced, diverse and varied adjustments to your life, as you live it.

A summary and example

First, depending on where you’re starting point is, some changes you make to move toward a healthier lifestyle may need to be drastic. Keeping these simple and visibly identifiable helps. Large one-off prompts may help jolt you into action and relieve you of conflicting engagements or taxing bouts of willpower.

Second, it’s important not to go overboard with too many deliberate and quantifiable goals. Life is complicated for most people which mean that meeting rigidly planned commitments can be near, or literally impossible in the complicated juggling that goes on. Feeling like a failure and then giving up, can often make the tactile goal more trouble than it’s worth.

Lastly, focusing on the actions rather than end-results serve to stabilise any changes you make. Even though benchmarks can make progress tracking easier and provide a nice sense of achievement, they can make thinking long-term aspirations difficult and when it comes to adopting healthier practices, the long-term is really all that matters.

In our house, we’re in the process of increasing our intake of quality animal products - namely bone broth and fatty meats. The commitment to going shopping almost every other day in pursuit of fresh, local and wholesomely produced food is a pretty big step and has taken some serious adjustment regarding how we plan our days. Trying to lift weights more is a slight yet high-impact adjustment we’re trying to make. Gym memberships have been paid for, but there’s no strict program or class-commitment. Half an hour, twice a week is the loose goal we’re trying to hit as a minimum standard. Sprinting more is the last health related change we’re hoping to make going forward. The killer Australian heat makes it tough for about half the year, so winter has never been a problem, but 4 or 5 100m dashes once or twice a month on average throughout the year seems reasonable to me. Regularly moving at maximum exertion (for short instances) is incredibly beneficial, and far more time efficient.

That’s as far as it goes for in terms of 2016 health resolutions. Three very simple and deliberate changes to make, but neither is set up as a finish line to succeed or fail at reaching. Again, the act of incorporating these into our lives for the long-term is absolutely more important than to what standard we meet these within the next 12 months. Stopping once success is reached to go back to normal is not success at all. Success is establishing a new normal.

According to my Healthy Forever followers, about 50% of people set health and fitness related New Year's resolutions.

Primal Living Part 2 - Ancestral health in the modern world

Last week in Part 1, we introduced the key principals of the Primal Lifestyle -- namely, what to eat and how to exercise. This week, it may serve helpful to discuss some of the background of the Primal Blueprint and where it fits in with life in the 21st century. In doing so, we examine the analogy of "Ancestral Health" by which we mean, emulating the habits of our ancestors whom existed for thousands of years without any of the "lifestyle diseases" plaguing us today. The goal is to understand how to adopt these principals and live primal in the sedentary, highly processed, over-worked world the majority of us live in . 

Ancestral Health

A common misconception about wanting to live like our paleolithic counterparts is that it's about actually turning back time. It's not. Being paleo or primal isn't about camping in your backyard, producing all of your own food, or hunting stray animals. The idea is to use what we know about evolutionary biology through the use of modern science and marry it with the principles and concepts of our ancestors that evolved and lived in optimal physical condition for hundreds of thousands of years. Now, I've explained this to a few friends and the usual question is “isn’t life expectancy much longer now than it was for cavemen?” While the logic behind this question may be understandable, it's still misguided. Yes today, odds are, we will live pretty long lives - much longer than people did 5000 years ago. However, this is because we don’t have to worry about dying from the flu, an infected cut or the shock of a broken limb, not because we are more physically fit and healthy. Plus, we don’t have to worry about being attacked by bears, hyenas, snakes or crocodiles as much as we once had to. What we do have to worry about is obesity, heart-attacks, Alzheimer's disease  and strokes.

Our declining health is absolutely the most important wide spread societal problem there is. Public health care budgets are ballooning so much that it's becoming general consensus that in 30 years such support will cease to exist. Billions of public and private dollars are funneled to providing health care. What makes this worse is that all of these leading conditions creating this drain on facilities, professionals and resources are generally agreed upon to be preventable. The problem is that most people have just been given the wrong information. Fat-free, carbohydrate rich foods do not make up a healthy diet.  The truth of the matter is, outside of the last 300 years, the modern western diet wasn't even possible for our species to survive on - let alone thrive on.

Sugary foods at the base of the pyramid? Crackers healthier than Broccoli? This is crazy. 

The reality is that our ancestors simply didn’t regularly  have the carbohydrate heavy foods that have become the basis of the modern western diet. Rice, bread, corn syrup, pasta, sugar and fruit weren’t routinely eaten because they were incredibly difficult to gather and produce (impossible in some cases depending on the region). Animal meat and fresh vegetables were the staple foods that have sustained humans for hundreds of thousands of years. Fruits were seasonal, in tall, difficult to access trees  and competed for with more nimble animals and thus only available in relatively small amounts. Even honey was protected by bees. Where today we can have something sugary sweet whenever we want in large amounts, foods full of glucose and fructose were a rare treat for our primal brethren. Nevertheless, thanks to a combination of poor science, selfish economics and shortsighted governance, we have the USDA approved Food Pyramid above. Odds are, anyone who went to school after the 1960s learned this as the key to a healthy diet. I bet I didn't even need to include the image, everyone knows it. How could we have been so wrong? Not only is it backwards in term of carbohydrates, but look at those tiny little white triangles representing sugar. How on earth can the foundation of a healthy diet include sugar? If you want to refresh your memory, click here to see the Primal food pyramid. The one that is actually good for you. 

Eat less carbs, be more healthy. This is the most important rule people need to know.

This chart shows the simple relationship between the bodies natural ability to burn fat efficiently, which is what we all want and need to be able to do in order to maintain good health. It also shows the disruption carbohydrates do. Generally, and if we're speaking entirely of weight control, there is a range between 100 and 150g of carbohydrates per day that the average person can eat without gaining any weight. Any more than 150g and you enter the "Insidious Weight Gain" zone. Here, your carb intake is high enough that your body looks to them for all energy conversion rather than fat. If you train hard enough (60 minutes of intense daily workouts), then you can offset the insulin boost. If not however, any carbs not used are converted to fat and packed away, leaving a trail of sugar behind. 

Most of us aren't performance athletes

If you love it, go ahead and train like a marathon runner, but if your goals are just to look and feel good, and fight off disease, it shouldn't be that difficult. 

The reality is that food and activity are the cornerstones of any approach to improve health and the Primal way is no different. What is unique, is the principles of what you eat and why, and the significance this has on overall health. It’s a common belief that living healthy is mostly based on what you eat relative to how much you exercise. Most diets and workout plans will say this. Primal Living uses a ratio of about 80:20. Why is it then, that so many people spend 45 minutes to 2 hours of painful, boring and expensive time exercising on most days just to be healthy? Is that really necessary? If you’re a competitive soccer player or triathlete, all the power to you, it’s commendable that you have a passion and are so dedicated to it. Most of us don't have that passion. Most of us just want to feel better, look good , and reduce our chances of having a stroke while we still have a mortgage. 

Another big benefit with Primal is that I can miss workouts pretty regularly without feeling any effects. Sick, tired, busy or just not feeling like it isn't a detriment to my weight, energy levels or performance. 

Besides, this is isn’t about the triathletes. This is about the everyday worker that has a family history of heart-disease and wants to be able to play with their grandchildren. Why do they need a a carb-boost every 3 hours? Just so they can workout every afternoon? Or, do they work out every afternoon so that they can eat that jam bagel every morning and bowl of pasta every night? Is the point of eating and working out to ensure that we can and need to do both, or is the point of both to live a healthy life that satisfies us? Personally, I know I'm pretty lazy. Whether it's because of work, entertainment, leisure or rest -  I don't want to have to spend 1 hour a day exercising just to be healthy. I also don't want to feel like a failure and put on weight if something happens and I can't work out for a few days or weeks. It shouldn't be that hard and it doesn't have to be. 

Next week, I will discuss some of the similarities and differences between the other noteworthy high-protein/low-carb diets - Paleo and Atkins. I will also  try providing some insight into my personal habits and daily routines for those that may want a practical, real-world picture of an average person and how they go about maintaining their health long-term without trying very hard.

For any more information, or the scientific research behind any of this, head to MarksDailyApple as a starting point. On that note, just so we’re clear, this is heavily backed by current and increasing bodies of academic research based on health, nutrition and evolutionary biology. What I’ve tried to do is provide a very simple, layman's description of what this all entails.

Holiday Housework - Painting and Gardening

This week I started a couple weeks of holidays, and with all breaks, the priority is house work. Job number one was to repaint our front steps since as you can see, they finishing needs a fair bit of work. We were never after a big renovation, we just needed a bit of weatherproofing. The months from January to March are about as heavy as anywhere in the world in terms of rainfall. The steps were freshly painted when we moved in a year ago, and we didn't like the idea of hoping they would hold up after what has happened to them after just one year.

Cleaning, scraping and sanding the stairs took around 3 hours of my Sunday. This was my first time painting anything on the exterior so I am not entirely sure if I picked off enough paint. I didn't really feel like spending money on a power sander, so I did everything by hand. I am generally content with how much effort I was putting into everything. I made sure everything was smooth to the touch and splintering was reduced as much as possible. The first coat went on on Monday and the second coat on Tuesday. It's Thursday as write this and we've just started walking on it a few hours ago. It rained a little bit the other day so the fingers are crossed it dried properly.

On a bit of impulse, we walked into the store planning on just going with the basic dark brown, we figured, now is the perfect time to experiment with some of our colour ideas. If it works well, great, but if not, there was a good chance the stairs would eventually get scrapped within a few years anyway. We went with Colorbond Ironstone (Chip no T147) by Cabot's Timbercolour. The shop worker recommended it as the most durable and easiest to work with. I don't have anything to compare it to other than the British Paints we used to paint our bathroom white.

I'm not an expert when it comes to house painting but I do have some experience. I've done interior drywall a few times painting my room as a kid, and I've painted the aforementioned bathroom. This being said, I don't know how to apply painter's tape. I always end up having to retouch. 

After two coats, we're more than happy with how it looks. We'll see how it holds up after this summer (we average over 1000mm of rain from Nov to Feb with 35C temperatures), but as it stands we really like it. Although I read and watched a lot of how-to's, this article in +SFGate  by +Kristy Robinson seemed to be the one I referred to the most.

We plan on making some major renovations and extensions to the house over the next 5 years so there's a good chance the steps could get scrapped, or at least redone sometime in that term. In any case, I was looking forward to this as an opportunity learn a little bit about exterior timber restoration. We're still in the drawing stages, but I'm sure a deck will be part the aforementioned renovations.

Tending to the garden was second on the list of priorities. Having these two projects to focus on in tandem worked quite well. You wouldn't tell from the photo, but I really like gardening. I am really enjoying revitalising our yard, which was in fairly bad shape when we moved in. There's a lot of laborious work in lawn repair (turfing, weeding, levelling, etc.) so we made sure to have one aesthetically pleasing garden to care for in the meantime.

After turning over the soil and pulling the weeds we moved the bulbs to the edges and planted a few begonia, ixora and hibiscus bushes. I am hoping we are not foolish for not laying down weedmat or spraying any sort of weed killer. Some have told us it's a necessity, others have assured us they've never used it. Live and learn. In terms of design, a less organised arrangement seems to work best with the vibe of our yard. Also, it's easier. It seems a little bare, but I'm counting on the shrubs to fill out. One thing's for certain, I love the smell and look of  the tea tree mulch the nursery recommended. We shall see.

One year into owning our fixer-upper and I'm learning that really the only way to learn is by trying and hoping for the best. We're loving chipping away at all of the jobs this old house keeps presenting to us. It's the end of day 6 and the two main tasks are complete. I still have 12 days left to my holiday, and although nothing is planned, I'm sure the house will give me something to do. Abraham Maslow said, "if the only tool you have is a hammer, (it is tempting to) treat everything as if it were a nail". I'm sure the law of the instrument still applies with a paint brush.