A health and fitness post...

Sadly, I'm doing one of those standard bride-to-be type things: trying to lose weight.  However, I'm also just plain trying to improve my health, whether that results in weight loss or not.  I know I need to eat more healthily: one of my major goals is to work towards actually achieving the five servings of vegetables and two fruit that is the recommended daily amount - and believe me, given my general aversion to fruit, this is going to take some work on my part.  And five servings of vegetables is a LOT.

Then there's drinking enough water and getting enough steps... and then enough cardio on top of that.

I'm working on choosing one aspect each week and focusing on getting that up to scratch, then the next the next week, etc.  Sometimes I feel like I'm moving far too slowly by doing this, but it's better to move slowly than to rush through and then give up because it's all too hard.

Something that I'm finding surprisingly helpful is the Nudge app.  I downloaded it on the 4th of January to help me keep track of my daily servings of fruit and vegetables, but it does so much more than that and I really appreciate the extra bells and whistles: I can also keep track of water consumption, it's connected to my Fitbit account to bring in the number of steps I've taken, and I can track additional activity as well (although I also do that in My Fitness Pal which links with Fitbit for non-step activity: once I get back into a few other regular activities like swimming and yoga, I'll see about tracking them there. Via Apple Health it picks up my sleep data from Sleep Cycle, and takes all this data together to create a "nudge factor" based on the last 30 days.  Obviously I haven't yet been using the app for 30 days yet, so I'm not yet at an accurate picture of what it says my health is (I know my health isn't great, but I hope there's not quite so much red compared to yellow and green once there's a full 30 days of data to work from.  On the other hand, because of the law of averages, at the moment my Nudge Factor keeps going up each day, whereas it will no doubt plateau once there are no more "0" data days.

This is probably the most successful 'gamification' of health that I've come across, moreso than Health Month, which I used for a couple of years, but was much higher maintenance than Nudge.  I say this a lot but I really do intend to come back with an update on how its all going in about a month's time.