For the month of November, I attempted my first 30 day challenge and it was to drink 2 litres of water daily.

I didn’t think it would have been that hard to drink 2 litres of water each day but I found it to be quite a lot of water to consume during a normal day.

What I did find was that it was really easily to consume the water in days that I attended the gym, where in some instances I’d do over three litres in a day but then over a weekend I’d do a bit less than 2 litres.

Over the course of the month I averaged 1.95 litres per day, so I didn’t reach the challenge goal. However, given that it was such a massive increase from my close to zero daily water intake, I’m actually going to chock it up as a success.

One thing that it didn’t seem to slow down was my coffee intake and I mentioned to Claire that might be one of my next challenges – no coffee or caffeine for a month, yowzer!

Wholly schmolly, I’m now officially 31!

My birthday started with with Claire, Hugo & Evie greeting me in bed. Hugo ran into the room and wished me happy birthday for the first time, which is more than a little bit special.

Claire found some beautiful paper and ribbon to wrap my presents in, it was a shame to unwrap them really but you’re forced to on your birthday – hehe. I was incredibly spoiled for presents from the family this year & received:

• a brown denim pair of shorts & a pair of nice shirts
• Steve Jobs biography
• Mission Impossible 3 & The Social Network on DVD
• Lindt chocolates
• iPhone dock

After presents it seemed reasonable to bring our weekend ritual of McDonald’s for breakfast forward a day, which while Hugo doesn’t understand days of the week yet – he was more than happy about.

Unlike virtually every other year, we broke tradition and didn’t visit Hogs Breath Cafe for lunch and instead made our way down to a new, local cafe called Luv-A-Coffee not to far from our place. Sterle, Lorraine & Jean joined us for lunch which was great, especially since Sterle was feeling under the weather. I’d only been there once before for morning tea but the coffee & cake was delicious. Lunch certainly didn’t disappoint, I had a ‘small’ serving of spaghetti bolognaise and it was more than I needed for lunch.

After lunch we rolled our way back to our place, enjoyed a chocolate cake that Claire made and Hugo decorated with purple sprinkles & fire fighting candles to top if off. The cake was really nice, Hugo & Evie certainly enjoyed it yesterday and today.

For the afternoon we stayed at home, watched Robots on DVD which is one of Hugo’s favourites at the moment and mucked around at home. Late last night I ventured out to the movies with Shea to see Tower Heist featuring Eddie Murphy & Ben Stiller which was a good watch.

A quick thank you to all my family, extended family & work colleagues for calling or sending me an SMS and also to everyone that dropped me a line on instant messenger and facebook as well – well wishes on your birthday are fantastic.

Onward and upward, 32 next year!

Since I started gradually losing weight over a year ago now, I’ve been on the look out for small changes I could make to my lifestyle that I felt I could maintain moving forward.

I’ve never been much of a water drinker across the course of the day, which I suppose is quite silly since the human body is over 50% water. I certainly drink my fair share of water when exercising but it isn’t a drink I think to consume throughout a normal day.

I recently attended a Franklin Covey training course and it was mentioned that it takes around 21 days to set a new habit. That reminded me of Matt Cutts, a famous Google employee among the online marketing world who regularly does 30 day challenges.

It’ll be the first time I’ve ever taken on a short term challenge like this before and it seems like a great opportunity to assess different aspects of your life and make some small changes around things that might have a meaningful impact, either short, medium or long term.

Tomorrow I’m going to buy a 1 litre bottle of water so I can easily keep track of how much water I’m drinking across the day. Just like I did with my weight loss, I’ll be keeping track of my daily water intake in Google Docs so I can see how successful I’ve been over the month.

As an added benefit, I’m hoping that increasing my water consumption will have the opposite effect on my coffee intake. I really do love drinking coffee, however I know I drink too much of it. So if drinking more water helps with reducing that at the same time, it is definitely a win win situation.