Find Common Meeting Times With Google Calendar

A new add-on for Firefox and IE8 allows users to find a common meeting time with their Google Calenders. No more back and forth as you try and figure out when everyone you need to attend a meeting has a free time slot. Great if you're a Google Calendar ninja.

You can download the plugin here

P.S. If you're not using FireFox already, you should be. Download Firefox here.

Eat Right In Hong Kong

So there was a recent copy of The List kicking around our aparment, and as I'm leafing through it I come across an ad for a restaurant in Soho called Eat Right. I've walked passed the restaurant plenty of times but have never eaten there - but what caught my eye in the ad was a service they're promoting called the "Eat Right Food Programme".

Apart from the fact that "Food Programme" makes it sound like a U.N. aid initiative, I'm intruiged by the idea that this service is available in Hong Kong. I duly checked out their website, but was a little disappointed to find next to no information that wasn't already in the ad.

• no info on the nutritionist
• no info on pricing options
• no basic info on what it means to eat healthily

What it does say is that:

• it's a monthly subscription
• you get meals delivered twice a day

And that's about it. I emailed Eat Right to ask for more information, but they didn't bother to reply.

I think services like this are a great starting point for people who want to learn more about what constitutes healthy eating by helping to understand a) what portion sizes really look like and b) what types of food are OK to eat . I say a starting point though, because long term, this is not a sustainable change to your lifestyle.

For starters, having meals delivered to you twice a day is not very flexible. You still need to be able to socialize with friends and in business settings, so that means over a longer period of time you're going to have to be able to make better decisions on your own.

Variety is another factor. While I'm sure there is variety within the menu itself - food delivered from the same kitchen is probably going to be limited to ingredients that don't stray too far from their main wholesale buying requirements. This also says nothing of eating food that you're in the mood for. Having a better overall understanding of how to eat healthily allows you to make decisions that fit your mood, schedule and tastes without being locked into a menu being prepared by someone else.

At some point I'll posts some more thoughts about what and how to eat for a healthier lifestyle, but for now here's a couple of ideas to get you thinking:

• Eat food that looks like food. Obvious, but important. A Dorito does not look like anything you'd find in nature - so you're best option is to stay away.
• Eat little and often. Studies show that people who follow this method of food intake don't suffer from big energy swings (feel like napping after lunch?). This makes you more productive, able to focus longer and importantly reduces the likelyhood you'll overeat when you do sit down to a meal.
• Sit down to a meal.  If you eat all your meals in front of the TV, your chances over eating are significantly increased. This is because your brain is distracted by all the pretty pictures and is less likely to signal that you're full. Sitting at a table keeps you focussed on the task at hand and is far more sociable.
• Limit alcohol. That's not no alchol, but limit it. Everyone knows that alcohol has empty calories in it, but I think most people underestimate it. Consider this: 5 pints of Heineken = 1,100 calories (approx.) which would take more than 1 hour running to burn off. Do your liver and your waistline a favour and limit your alcohol intake and you'll be well on the way.

So, Eat Right's food programme might be a great place to start and hopefully anyone who does it will learn something along the way about making better food choices instead of abdicating that responsibility (and then complaining that it doesn't work later on), but in the long run, by arming yourself with better overall food knowledge, you'll be in much better shape.

How Do You Spend Your Day?

The New York times has created a very slick interactive chart showing how Americans over the age of 15 spend their day.

It's quite interesting to see how the different demographics spend their time and although there's plenty in here which is obvious, there are a few things I thought were interesting:

Among the employed workforce who reported their day in this survey - the average time spent working was 5 hours, 12 minutes (if only my day was that short).

But it would also seem that people with advanced educations also work smarter, not harder, by a full 2 minutes:

When it came to sports or physical activity, the numbers got a little misleading. According the chart - men played sports or watched sports for an average of 27 minutes per day. Erm...last time I checked - watching sports was not the same as doing it. Who would have thought a simple misunderstanding was the reason for soaring obesity rates?

There's plenty more in there - so have a snoop around and see how you compare.

How do you spend your day?

How To Look After Your Skin In The Sun

The International Agency for Research on Cancer recently updated their position (BBC News) on sunbeds to "carcinogenic to humans" i.e., getting your tan from a sunbed is like smoking asbestos...or should that be like smoking or exposure to asbestos.

Either way - it turns out that they're pretty bad for you. Personally, I've never been on a sunbed, I've never needed to thanks to my Latin roots, but I still make sure that I'm wearing sunblock when I'm going to be outside for any reasonable period of time.

Also - we've got a one-year old now who loves to splash about in the pool, so making sure she's protected from UV has become even more of a priority. Some sources even say that 80% of skin damage can occur before you're 18, although in the searches that I did for this I found no credible references or citations.

I think skin protection is one of those subjects that everyone thinks they know about - but in reality could do a refresher on the basics (AIDS/HIV is another one) so here's a short list of facts about skin cancer that you might have forgotten, and seeing as we're hitting the middle of summer, might come in handy:

Ultraviolet Light

• UV light comes in 3 flavours: UVA, UVB and UVC
• All UV light damages collagen fibres in the skin, thereby accelerating the skin's ageing process.
• UVC is scary dangerous, but we generally don't have to worry about it as it can't get through the Earth's atmosphere.
• UVA is the stuff responsible for causing melanoma - the type of skin cancer that you definitely don't want, but which is also the least common of the skin cancers from sun damage.
• UVA doesn't burn the skin or damage DNA - things UVB is really good at.

Sun Screen

• Sunscreen uses an SPF rating to determine how much radiation your skin will take to burn in comparison to not wearing it - i.e., if you're wearing SPF 15, that means your skin will not burn until it has been exposed to 15 times the radiation that would normally be required to burn it. So its effectiveness is going to be dictated, at a minumum, by the time of day and intensity of the sun's rays.
• Always buy a sunscreen that inlcudes UVA protection - most don't and UVA is the one that's going to increase your chances of melanoma (bad).
• Sunscreen should be applied well in advance of when you actually need it - 30 minutes would be good. This allows the cream more time to be absorbed by your skin offering better protection and less likely to be washed away by sweat, swimming etc.
• SPF 15 is the minimum recommended amount and should be reapplied regularly and immediately after swimmming.

Skin Cancer

• Skin cancer is the most common form of cancer in the USA with almost 1 million cases diagnosed annually and in the UK the number is estimated to be 100,000.
• The 2 main types of skin cancer are malignant melanoma and non-melanoma skin cancer (NMSC).
• In the UK, the chance of developing a melanoma is 1 in 91 for men and 1 in 77 for women (source) but unforntunately I can't find figures for Hong Kong.
• The survival rate for non-melanoma skin cancer is 99% in the first year and 91% over 5 years - so it's quite a treatable cancer if you can detect it early.
• The survival rates for malignant melanoma are a little harder to tabulate and melanoma is broken down into 9 stages. Roughly speaking - if you catch melanoma in stage 1A, 88% live for 10+ years. If you are in the final stage, stage 4, your chances of living another 5 years are down to a gut-wrenching 7-19%.

Protecting yourself and your children from the sun isn't really that difficult, but the cost of not doing it could be devastating.

Play safe.

How To Kick A Bad Habit

It seems that kicking some of our naughty habits might be as simple as planing our responses before the habit is triggered. According to an article in Psychology Today:

Students at Utrecht University in the Netherlands confessed to indulging at home or at school, alone or with friends—all potential "situational" cues to eat. But they also blamed a whole separate class of cues: "motivational" drivers such as seeking enjoyment, avoiding boredom, and wanting to be sociable.

To test which were the true triggers of the munchies, the researchers formed two groups of students. People who specifically planned what to do when confronted by a motivational cue—e.g., "If I'm bored and I feel like a snack, I'll eat an apple"—ate more fruits and vegetables and 90 fewer calories of junk food over the following week. But those who plotted counterattacks on situational triggers ate just the same as ever.

The hard part is figuring out what motivates you to engage in that behaviour in the first place. The article suggests keeping some sort of diary to track this - but I'm not the diary keeping type and the discipline to do this amongst everything else that we have deal with on a daily basis makes this too complex for my liking.

So here are some simple tips for helping replace the bad habits with better ones.

• Start slow. Don't try and change your whole life in one go. - it rarely works. If you're trying to quit smoking and lose weight and get fit and drink less caffeine; taking them all on in one go is likely to end badly. Pick something, nail it and then move on to the next thing.
• Replace the temptation. Giving things up is hard and we're wired to be loss averse, so in some cases you might be able to replace rather then drop a habit . Restocking your junk food cupboard, for example, with healthier alternatives means you'll be better off then next time you find yourself wanting to eat in front of the TV rather than giving up eating in front of the TV.
• Plan ahead. Planning makes a difference. If you always hit the supermarket on your way home when you're hungry, you're more likely to make poor choices. Planning your weekly shop, your weekly gym sessions, your nights out in advance, will help you stay on track (and can usually save you money too).
• Write it down and show it around. In an article "What is the active ingredient in lasting commitments?" the authors detail studies that show people who write down goals are more likely to succeed in acheiving them. By showing them to friends and family, you create a social commitment to achieving those goals which increases your chances again of meeting your objectives. If you're seriosuly committed to change - then this would be the way to go.

What are your best tips for beating bad habits and what ones did you succesfully conquer?