Ask Amanda: An Apple A Day

So upon the consistent urging of my dear boyfriend, I finally got the Apple Watch Series 3 (you know, the one that has cellular).

I’ll pause for applause (*cough*).  Eh….ok.

I say “finally” because honestly, I’ve been an Apple addict for a long time now – I switched over to a Macbook from a s*tty PC like four laptops ago, I’ve had every iteration of the iPhone since 3.0, and I generally welcome our Apple, Google, and Amazon overlords in most of my day-to-day habits and choices.

JUST PUT IT STRAIGHT INTO MY VEINS BRO

That said, I was a holdout on the Watch.  BUT WHY?

I think part of the issue was a weird attachment to my phone – my glorious, massive, brick of an iPhone 7 Plus.  I carry it EVERYWHERE with me – it actually has a ghetto-fabulous credit card pocket glued onto the back of the case so I have my transit card, credit card, and IC with me wherever I go, purse or no purse.

I was also carrying my phone everywhere to get steps, because ever since the demise of my FitBit somewhere around 2015, it’s the only thing I have tracking my movement, which is stupid and cumbersome when I’m just trying to run out for a quick coffee but saddled down with my 3-pound phone.

So I bit the bullet, saved up my salary, and got myself a glorious Apple Watch (series 3 GPS Cellular with 42mm face and Pink Sand Sport Band):

#humblebrag on the low RHR no big deal

The photo above displays one of my favourite and most-used features: the heart rate monitor.  Yep, not only do I like to track my resting HR (a helpful indicator of your overall cardiovascular fitness), I also like to see how hard I’m working during my workouts – because truth be told, even trainers need to be pushed to reach their anaerobic (about 84% MHR and above) threshold from time to time.

The workout features of the Watch also include tracking calorie burn as well as average and peak HR during exercise – and I’ve compared it to my power meter output on a Spin bike and my Orangetheory results during class and both time it was spot-on accurate.

Besides “workout-y” workouts, perhaps my number one feature on the Watch is the activity tracker, which are the three rings featured on the main watch face below:

The end of a particularly active (exhausting) day.

The red ring is your overall calories burned (this is considered ON TOP OF your basal metabolic rate, which is how many calories you’d burn anyway just being alive, which for most of us STILL makes up the bulk of our daily burn).  The bright green ring is your daily exercise minutes, which is calculated by a combination of heart rate elevation and overall movement.  And the third blue ring is your stand minutes, which gives you a point for each hour you got up and moved for at least one minute (so literally, how many hours in the day during which you AT LEAST stood up for 60 seconds – not too tough).

You actually get little vibrating FIREWORKS when you close all your rings! HURRAH FOR ME!

As a trainer, I am constantly trying to encourage my clients to track their movements and eating habits and consider their larger patterns in the pursuit of their individual goals.  For examples, a lot of clients come to me telling me they’re “pretty active,” when in reality they do about one hour of moderate exercise per day (if that!) and sit most of their other waking hours, at work and leisure.

The Apple Watch doesn’t let you get away with that definition of active – between the daily burn goal (which you set), the exercise minutes (a minimum 30 per day), and the standing, the Activity app encourages more consistent movement patterns throughout the day – as well as gives you some great heart rate feedback on the exercise you are doing, in real time.

But what about those of us who don’t really care about our activity levels (breaking my trainer heart, but I know you’re out there)?

You can customise your “honeycomb” of apps on your phone and it shows up organised on your watch.  Boom.

The Watch also has a lot of compatible apps for sleep quality tracking (another crucial component of overall wellness, and something few of us pay close attention to), a “quick add” feature that syncs to the MyFitnessPal diet tracking app, a notification-enabled period and ovulation tracking app called Flo (sorry, fellas, this one’s not for you – but ladies, if you’re not tracking your cycle and how it relates to your body and moods, you’re doing your physical AND mental health a disservice), and convenient for workouts AND cooking (ha!), a one-touch timer and stopwatch/lap app at a glance.

There’s also compatible apps for calculator, Twitter, weather, language translators, and hey Dad – even your beloved Nest (a remote-control home thermostat) is on here!

Not convinced yet?  I haven’t even gotten to the cellular/phone-ish features.

The Apple Watch Series 3 is completely independent of the iPhone for most things (a notable exception: Watchify, the Spotify-playing app for Watch, which drives me NUTS because I can’t have access to my favourite non-iTunes playlists while running unless I take my phone), which means you can get your WhatApp notifications, take phone calls (yes, you  heard me right – you can ANSWER and SPEAK TO phone calls via your watch even without your phone, which is Inspector-Gadget style space age biz), and get news, FB, and Instagram updates on the run – no tethering to your phone required.

I still plan on taking an Apple Watch class from one of those geniuses at the Apple Store when I have time, but in the meantime, here are another 40 (!) tips and tricks to make your watch work for you.

And finally – because I know you’re all wondering – how much is this kit n’ kaboodle, anyway?  Here in Singapore I bought the watch for $648 SGD ($493 USD), added $88 for the AppleCare coverage (because I don’t do well with nice things), and pay $6.90/month for the cellular tethering on my mobile carrier.  Not too shabby considering that I absolutely love it, will use it until it is irrelevant, and find it wildly convenient and useful to my active, on-the-move, data-obsessed daily lifestyle.

Would you ever get an Apple Watch – or do you have one already?  What do you think?

Ask Amanda: How Healthy is TOO Healthy?

In the course of my Precision Nutrition coaching homework, I’ve read a lot about overcoming the “introductory” type of of challenges you get when coaching folks that are new to health and fitness (things like, “I don’t like vegetables” or “do I really have to eat protein with every meal?” or “why are five Diet Cokes a day a problem if they have zero calories?”).

However, it’s not the newbie clients that are the most challenging.  Not by a long shot.

My clients are too savvy for me to sneak this by them 😉

I am currently reading the chapter about “special scenarios” in nutrition, and it is here that we delve deep into the many, MANY types of disordered eating (DE).  Mind you, this is not the psychiatric/clinical type of “eating disorder” we associate with diagnosed anorexia or bulimia (although those are definitely disordered).  DE habits can include:

• constantly obsessing over food / eating / not eating
• eating behaviors that both cause and are trying to relieve distress simultaneously
• eating in a way that doesn’t match physiological need (i.e., eating way more or less than you actually need for optimal health)
• eating behaviors that harm yourself or others
• orthorexia

One lonely tomato does not make a healthy meal…for anyone

If you haven’t heard of that last one, you might want to read up on it, as orthorexia is one of the fastest growing DE tendencies around the world.  It means an obsession with “clean eating” – not just healthy eating to lose weight, but an all-consuming focus on the relationship between food choices and health (alongside an increasing inabilty to enjoy food socially, or feel satisfied by food that isn’t stringently prepared/”approved”).

But is that such a bad thing, you might ask?  Don’t all us high-falutin’ nutrition folks wish the world were more like us, with our macros and our tracking apps and proper portions and our real-food-focused organic gluten-free sugar-free dairy-free spelt grains?

Sort of…well, actually probably no.

Mmm, salad.

Here’s the thing I always try to hit home with my clients: human nutrition is, and will always be, a balancing act.  You have to balance the food you want to eat (fries!) with the body you want to have (abs!) with a lifestyle you truly enjoy (fun!) and the best possible health you can achieve (fit!).  Examples:

• If you have the fries sometimes, you will probably have the fun, you likely won’t have all six of the abs, but you just as likely won’t probably do any long-term damage to your health.
• If you never have the fries, you probably have no fun (though perhaps also no guilt?), you might just find your abs, and your general health can still go either way.
• If you have all the fries all the time, it probably gets less and less fun, you can forget about the abs, and you are probably not living in your healthiest body.

You see how this works?  There are mandatory tradeoffs between lifestyle and nutrition, and they’re not all either damning or rewarding – they just are (one of my favorite-ever infographics about this very topic can be found here).

Why is time always wayyyyy in the other direction?

As a trainer, I feel a dutiful responsibility to demonstrate a strong, fit body, balanced nutrition, and a healthy life-work balance to my clients – but I have long given up on the pursuit of perfection.  As a wellness and health coach, I make my own tradeoffs too, and those of you know who me know that I will always choose an ice cold beer over uncovering those 3rd-6th abs (I’m ok with a two-pack at age 34, aight?).

So how do you know if you have a disordered relationship with food?  A wise man once said, check yourself before you wreck yourself:

• Are you terrified of becoming overweight (especially if you have never been overweight)?
• Do you feel guilt after eating?
• Do you avoid eating, even when you are physically hungry?
• Have others expressed concern over how much you eat, whether too little or too much?
• Do you exercise with the sole purpose of burning the caloric content of your food?
• Do you feel controlled by the food that you choose to eat (or not eat)?
• Do you feel like others pressure you to eat more/less?
• Do you claim to feel better when your stomach is empty?
• Are you constantly preoccupied with thoughts about being fat or being thin?
• Do you avoid trying new foods, going to social events with food present, or celebrating with food because you are afraid of eating “bad” food?

There’s no “grade” for the above test, but it is loosely based on the Eating Attitudes Test from Psychcentral.com, a screening tool used to pre-diagnose common disordered eating patterns before they become full-blown disorders – and I find it helpful to start some necessary – if often uncomfortable – discussions with clients that I sense may be heading down the DE path (or recovering from former DE patterns).

If you think you might have some of the warning signs of DE, definitely get an appointment with a nutritionist or dietitian to get your habits back on track and make sure you’re eating a balanced, satisfying, and nutritionally sound diet for your body. Healthy eating is a major part of a wellness lifestyle, but it’s not the only part – and when eating (or not eating) takes away the joy from other parts of your life, you know it’s time to reevaluate.

What tradeoffs do you make in balancing your body, health, diet – and sanity?