Ask HN: How do you stay (somewhat) healthy?

I'm working towards triathalon. I got back into running exactly a month ago, and ran a half-marathon last weekend. This weekend I went swimming, running and cycling at the gym both days. I've had to teach myself swimming and Sunday was the first day that I felt like I had the breathing in some form of control. It's fabulous to be so in the habit that it's easy to go. My trainer advises doing big stretches, biut that keep heartrate low.

I'm spread very thin at work between support, sysadmin and development. I do my best work on focus stuff (development and production sysadmin) at strange hours after several cups of tea, and am unhealthy on this count.

The food advice I've seen elsewhere here is good. Avoid sugar and starch (chips are tasty but terrible), always have breakfast. I used to be one of these geeks who didn't have breakfast, I've no idea how I survived. Some food in the morning is critical. Vegemite on toast (it's popular in Australia) is a killer breakfast - easy and consistently good.

UK have deals at the moment to get cheap bicycles through work. Also everyone's broke, so gyms are less busy, which has worked out well for me.

Hard to tell one anonymous person from another.

nice work! i ran my first half-marathon last spring. it was awesome!! anyone reasonably athletic can train in a couple months to run a half-marathon no problem. long running is totally awesome and zen. i've been meaning to get back into it but wacky swim sports have taken over my evenings.

> Oh yeah, and watch what you eat, I guess.

We may be complimentary hackers in this sense, so I'd like to expand on this sentence of yours.

I don't exercise very much, but be it good genes or not, I'm very healthy--ahem, as far as I know, where'd I put that piece of wood..?

From my years of exposure to the topic, what I've found is that your last sentence deserves far more than a sentence dedicated to it. For some (and only some) of the reasoning along this line of thought, see the TIME article "Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin": http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1914857,00.ht...

To stay healthy, I try my best to eat healthy. This means buying as many organic veggies that I can satisfactorily afford, and cooking and eating them at home. If you want to have a delicious and healthy dinner, don't go out, make it yourself at home. Besides saving money on the food and gas, you'll have yourself a healthier meal and you'll be doing the planet a favor. It'll probably taste better too.

Although I don't really think of myself as one, I'm typically a vegetarian as well. Meaning, I'll eat meat, but only if that meat was organically produced at a local farm. As such meat is hard to come by at the store, and completely nonexistant at the restaurants near me, this tends to be a very rare occasion indeed. Avoiding meat not only means that I spend less money on my groceries, but it also means I'm helping the environment, and am healthier as well (as a result of what "industrial meat" is).

Of course, discussions on healthy eating, and food in general, shouldn't fail to reference the movie Food Inc. and the book that inspired it: Michael Pollan's "Omnivore's Dilemma". If you haven't read that book, or seen that documentary, you may disagree with what I've said, and there's a decent chance that what you're eating is going to put you, and a decent chunk of American society, in an early grave. ;-)

This sounds interesting. I've had a few unusual diets in the past, and found packing lunches the hardest part. What types of things do you take if you need to carry a lunch with you?