Live Long and Be Happy

Lets start with our number one action item from the brain dump of last post. Collecting and tracking our numbers!

We have been using Withings smart scale for a couple of years now to track our weights. Me and my husband have separate accounts and it automatically recognizes who stepped on the scale and adds the new measurement to that person’s account. I now have almost 4 years worth of my weight graph! It include 2 pregnancies where the graph goes up and up and then suddenly sharply down right after the delivery 🙂

We love Withings scale so much that we actually have two of them 😛
We got our first one when I got pregnant with our daughter 4 years ago and opted for the one that does not analyze body composition because I was worried of the tiny electrical current that it passes through you. A couple years later, my husband also wanted to track his body fat ratio so we got the smart one too. What we found out later is that, you can just step off it right after you see your weight if you don’t want the body composition analysis 🙂 I guess even wearing socks would block the electrical current 😀

Now it is time to track my husband’s blood pressure being high-ish.

We already have an Omron at home and are happy with the consistency and ease of use. But this time we wanted something with wifi connection so that we can track the progress graph over time. Since we loved our Withings and have active accounts in that app, my first choice would be the Withings Wireless Blood Pressure Monitor. But unfortunately the reviews are not that bright. So we decided to follow the advice of the wirecutter.com and bought
Omron 10 Series Wireless Bluetooth Upper Arm Blood Pressure Monitor.

 

Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, which means, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you choose to make a purchase. I never recommend a product that I haven’t personally used and loved.

Last week I roughly mentioned about the not-so-healthy areas of our life. Now we need a plan to tackle those!

When I don’t know where to start, I usually grab a piece of paper – and some colorful pens – and begin putting the things on my mind into paper. I am so in love with stationary that I know this approach will at least make me sit down to start dealing with whatever I have going on. 🙂

So, I grabbed a journal and sat down. Since this is a long term project, I assigned a dedicated journal to it instead of using my everyday bullet journal. I first made a mind map of everything that came to my mind about healthy living. I didn’t care about the structure at all. Then I connected the ones that are related to each other. This gives me some basic areas of focus which I can later iterate on.

Although my mind map looks chaotic ;), it helped me pick a few key areas to start with.

1 – The most important one: Get some data and start tracking!

Because we need metrics to see the improvement. Occupational hazard I guess 😀 Anyway, we know for a while that my husband has a tendency for high blood pressure. Last we measured (like 2 years ago?) it was at the border of normal and high ranges. We should start tracking it seriously since hypertension is also known as silent killer.

2 – Research!

There are a few great books in my shelf about health and longevity. Also a ton of articles online that I marked for reading. I will start reading more and share what I learn.

3 – Healthy eating

We should start limiting meat and sugar. We should find ways to consume more vegetables, both in terms of quantity and variety. This will be a long game. But we can start with little improvements whenever and wherever we can. I am sure I will have tons of posts in this area.

4 – Be more active

Although this is probably our weakest side, we can only focus on so many things at once. Especially with 2 young kids! So being active will currently be a best-effort activity. We can try to walk to the park more often and go for an easy hike every now and then. My husband also wants to go to the gym regularly. Actually data collection is also important in this area, at least we should start tracking our daily steps.

Now that we have a very very rough plan, we should break it down and define actionable steps. Ready, set, go! 🙂

 

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This is the notebook I use for our longevity project. It is a B5 size dot-grid journal. The pages high quality, thin and smooth. The best part is, fountain pens and Tombow Dual Brush Pens don’t bleed through!

Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, which means, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you choose to make a purchase. I never recommend a product that I haven’t personally used and loved.

Let me first tell a bit about our family. My name is Gulhan. I am 34 and working full time as a software engineer. My husband is also a full time software engineer. We have 2 kids, a 3 year old daughter and a 4 months old son. Actually my son’s birth is what finally triggered this blog. He was only 3 weeks old by the time I first drafted my first post. But you know, it is hard to find time with a newborn so it took me several weeks to actually get a domain and publish it. 🙂

Having kids brings lots of responsibilities. But I have always believed that the biggest responsibility of parents is taking good care of themselves. This is something I decided long before I became a parent myself, during the days while I was seriously concerned about my dad’s poor health. I so envied my friends who didn’t have such concerns. And add to that the desire to raise the kids with healthy habits, and suddenly the “healthy living” became one of our biggest priorities. 

To form a baseline, I don’t think we as a family are doing terribly bad. We don’t eat too much fast food (define too much, right? :D), we eat some amount of veggies and fruits (not nearly enough though :/), we buy stuff organic/grass-fed/free-range as much as we can. We know how important sleep is (though we don’t respect is as much as we should). We don’t smoke. We have alcohol only on special occasions, maybe once a month. And our life is not terribly stressful.

And here comes the part that needs improvement. The number one is that we are not active. We feel lazy and tired often. We prefer watching an episode of Friends for the 36th time over walking to the neighborhood park in the evening. We don’t go to gym or do another kind of exercise regularly. We talk about hiking all the time but actually go for a hike maybe once or twice a year. We eat a lot of meat and not a variety of vegetables. We don’t track our blood pressure or cholesterol levels despite knowing that we had issues in the past.

Now I need to come up with a plan. 🙂

Hello world!

This is my very first post about our quest as a family to look for health and longevity. I can’t wait to dive into the topic and share what I learn along the way. I hope you will join me 🙂

Actually we have been thinking about this for a long long time. Things like, you know, we should eat more veggies, and we should be more active kind of things 😀 We think and talk about it all the time but when it comes to actually going to the gym, we always have something urgent to attend to. Or when shopping in a grocery store, we don’t nearly spend as much time around the vegetable section as the bakery section…

But I just decided that we shouldn’t waste any other day without taking action. I have decided to prioritize it, plan it, track it and actually act on it!

I am by no means an expert on health or how to live a long life. But I hope to dig deep, read a ton, learn a lot, and share all of it with you. I am soo excited! Please join our family on this journey! It will probably involve some broccoli and kale! 🙂