Confessions of a Bad Eater

By Monica Murray; Higher Resources.

When I told my friends, family, and colleagues that I would be contributing an article to this month’s monthly newsletter with the theme of Nutrition and the Workplace, most of them fell to the ground laughing.  When they dried the tears from their eyes, they realized that I wasn’t kidding.  Based on their reactions, I also realized that I am probably the worst person to be dolling out advice on nutrition.  So I am here really to fess up to my nutrition habits.   

Let’s start from the beginning.  Pre-children.  Being younger and working a zillion hours a week with other like-minded individuals, my diet consisted of fairly equalized parts fast food, healthy food, and alcohol.  Friday night drinks and nachos were a weekly part of bonding with my colleagues and letting off some steam.  Of course, there was time for exercise, which was also part of my social network.  Ah, the time to eat what I wanted, do what I wanted, and have the metabolism to get through it. 

Enter children.  Work is still a central part of my life, but so are my husband and child. Exit exercise and the time to eat properly.  I am like most who find several excuses as to why I can’t eat well or have the time to exercise. 

Someone once told me that people’s time can be split into a three-piece pie, meaning there is time for three major things in one’s life.  Work is most often one of them, and the other two can consist of exercise, family, relationships, self etc.  But how can we get them all to fit into the pie?  It is something that I struggle with everyday.  As women, we try to do it all.  There are a ton of coaches that go through how we need to stop trying to actually do it all.  I agree it can’t all be done.  There will always be choices and consequences to our choices.  Things ebb and flow; the trick is to be able to rise with the tides and fade back when we need to. 

What will make me change my habits?  Usually, for most it is some sort of drastic event.  For example, my computer crashed the other day and I saw all of my business contacts, calendar, and e-mail vanish before my eyes.  Did I have a back up?  I do now!  By some saving graces, I have been able to recover most of it.  But it took me less than one day to get myself set up with triple backups and a secure disaster recovery plan should it happen again. 

This event has caused me to pause and look at my life, especially my nutrition and exercise habits.  I know that I don’t eat as well as I should.  And I know that I should exercise more.   I also know that I shouldn’t have to wait for a drastic event to immediately change how I eat and work out.  The reality is we are all getting older, and with several years slipping by without feeding myself well and keeping myself fit, I can see the change.  I know it didn’t happen overnight.  But I can see the effects when I lack the energy to play consistently with my daughter.  I can see the effects when I huff and puff climbing a flight of stairs.  I can see the effects when my headaches increase in quantity and intensity.   

Will I change my habits?  I am certainly going to try.  But this is no easy task.  There’s the rub.  Good nutrition is a simple concept, but it is not easy to stick to (not for me anyways!).  Daily decisions will help the transformation.   By consistently not eating fast foods, drinking more water, taking the stairs, and eating breakfast I know I am heading in the right direction.  

Mom Spotlight – Nikki Pena

Niki Pena

1) Provide an overview of your job/business, how many hours you work.

Outside of being a new mom I’m a new business owner as well.  I guess you can say I have two babies… my daughter Leila and my waiter recruitment/training company DMH Banquet Service Professionals, www.dmhservices.ca .  My business partner Donald Haddad started the company in Summer 2006 and we incorporated in January.  Our client roster includes private members clubs like the Vancouver Club and high end hotels like the Sutton Place and the Vancouver Marriott Pinnacle Hotel.  We also service the River Rock Casino Resort and Boulevard Casino.  We are banquet service recruiters and trainers.  What sets us apart from other recruitment companies is that we also offer ongoing professional development when it comes to hospitality training.  We think the idea of warm hospitality and quality service has been missing from Vancouver establishments for a long time and that’s something we’d like to see changed.

Owning your own business, watching it expand and nurturing it to grow is like having a child.  It’s 24/7 as we’re constantly recruiting and training new staff, building better working relationships with our staff and clients and connecting with other businesses to fill their needs.  My work day starts at 9am and does not necessarily wrap up in 8 hours as there are dozens of emails and phone calls to get through, clients’ needs to fill and staff to schedule.  There’s also time spent marketing the company and brainstorming ideas to make it grow.

2) Provide an overview of your home life, how many children you have, childcare arrangement, if married your husband’s career and how you share the responsibilities at home.

Life at home is fairly routine… that is to say my husband Amir and I have a good schedule that works for us.  We have one child, a four month old girl, and we do dream of having another.  Our day generally starts at 7am when we wake up and share some morning time together talking about what our day will be like.  By 730 or 8 we wake Leila up and play with her for half an hour and then it’s time to feed her and that’s when my husband gets ready to go to work.  He works as an Infrastructure Architect for an IT company called Softlanding.  By 9am, he’s off to work and in between Leila’s play time and nap time I’m on the computer answering emails or taking phone calls.  I feel fortunate to be able to work from home.  I’m able to get work done and spend time with my daughter.  That’s not to say there aren’t any problems.  There are times when I do feel pulled in both directions… when I do feel a crunch trying to get work done and there are times when I feel guilty for doing work at all and not spending all of my time focused on my daughter. 

I’m lucky though that I have an understanding and extremely supportive husband.  His work is nine to five, Monday to Friday and as soon as he comes home he and Leila are inseparable.  At first I felt badly for him that he didn’t have that special time with our daughter as I do.  Because I’m nursing I have at least half an hour just ‘me and her’ time at least six times a day.  I feel breastfeeding is really a gift (for her and for me) that helps create and solidify such a special bond between us.  It makes me feel important… that her very survival is dependant on me and that it’s so easy for me to do this for her… to be able to physically nuture and grow a life.  That’s something so special that my husband will never get to feel or experience.  Outside of feeding time, Amir shares in all of our responsibilities at home.  We cook together, he cleans up the bathroom and takes out the garbage, I clean up the kitchen and we both do the vacuuming.  I think there is such a mutual admiration and respect for each other that we don’t mind doing household chores because we’re doing it for the other person.  I know he works hard, he knows I work hard and that makes us both want to help each other out as much as we can.

-I don’t want to make it sound as if our home life is perfect… nobody’s is.  We come across challenges, like everybody else, we get tired and frustrated and sometimes lose our patience… but what helps us get through is our respect and love for each other… what helps us get through is the thought that we don’t only serve ourselves but our family as well… that we have a responsibility to our family.

3) Could you discuss 3 tips for women who are managing their careers or their own businesses. 

I feel like I’m so new to this, managing motherhood and a successful business, that I should be asking for your advise!  But that’s not to say I’ve not learned a few things already.

-Don’t second guess yourself, listen to your gut and intuition it’s brought you to where you are so far and that’s a good thing.  There are too many times that we worry about whether we’re making the right decision and often times we waste time wondering should I? or shouldn’t I?  or was that the best way to go?  And if the plan fails, you always have an opportunity to learn from this mistake.  Making mistakes is just another way of learning and growing and becoming a better manager, business owner, etc.

-Don’t be afraid to let go of some control and delegate, surround yourself with positive, like minded people that you can trust.

-Take the time to celebrate your accomplishments

4) Of your female friends with children how many of them continue to work now that they have children.

 All but two of my female friends with kids continue to work.

5) Can you offer any advice for achieving a balance between your family life and your career.

It sounds so cliché but it’s too true:  Don’t sweat the small stuff.  Sometimes you have to step back and really look at a situation and realize that it’s not that important to get all worked up about.  So, the dishes stay in the sink for a few more hours, or that phone call gets put off until the next day.  Those are things that aren’t going to ruin you.  You have to weigh what’s most important to you at that moment with clear vision.

Having a child really changes you and it changes the relationships around you.  My husband and I always try to maintain our relationship by talking to each other, sharing our feelings.  We take the time to reassure each other, cheer for each other and listen to each other.  Like any relationship, business or personal, you have to put the time in and stay committed to doing that.

-I am also very fortunate to have grown up with a family full of positive, strong minded women (my mom, seven aunts on my mom’s side, my older sister and four female cousins.)  Every woman in my family works hard, maintains a household and a career.  I draw on that strength all the time and not just from my family but from the women around me, my girlfriends.  What helps me achieve a balance between family and career is being able to talk things through with girlfriends and family, bounce ideas off them and learn from them… creating a solid support system is also pretty important.

Taking Care of Yourself

You love your new job, but you hate what it seems to be doing to your body. Whether you’re out at work or working from home, chances are you are doing a lot of it sitting down at your desk. It a phenomenon a lot of people notice when they begin work in an office – that sitting down and the working lifestyle it spawns is a weight-ballooner if not addressed.

The weight gain is understandable: you’re too busy to take time out to make (or even buy the multiple ingredients for) a healthy whole grain sandwich with plenty of veggies. You forgot your bottle of water and apple on the counter, but have plenty of change for the snack machine. You have opted to work through lunch and go home early and are fueling yourself with the candy in your desk. You are working in the middle of the night because working at home means you can. The coffee is perking; the chips are strategically on your desk. You will not take time out to go work out to that exercise video while the living room is such a mess. Not only that, there are errands to run and a child that is demanding your attention.

There’s no question about it. Getting to work, while tiring in its own way at times, cuts out a whole lot of the walking around that you were doing before. With tiredness from working comes a compulsion to reach for the junk food and caffeine for the quick fix. Soon you are in a nutritionally deficient tailspin that keeps you reaching for the artificial uppers; that while not illegal, are certainly bad for you. I’m not saying that a morning coffee or an afternoon sweet are out of place. But they are when you multiply them or couple them with less exercise and more take-out cuisine after work.

It is not a lot of work to keep nutrition on task along with your other duties. The sooner you do it, the less work it will be undoing the negative nutrition you may have been practicing. Look for the little ways to change the bad habits you have gotten into. As you start to feel better, you will be motivated to make more change and will have the energy to do it.

The first step is recognizing the problem. An early sign of mis-feeding ourselves is the sluggishness we feel mid afternoon or the urge to jump into bed when our kids do at 7:30. You might notice your pants are too tight or that your belt does not seem to make sitting down comfortable. While weight gain after starting a sedentary job is unsettling, the answer is not to rush out and buy more clothes and resign yourself to life at a larger size. Nor is it to crash diet and deprive your mommy brain from basic functioning capability. The answer is the common sense tool you might have been hoping it wasn’t. Eat better, move more. It is an effort, but it’s not painful. Here are a few hints to merge healthfulness with the work place.

1. Drink your water. Limit your caffeine. Dehydration makes you headachy and less productive.
2. Fit in whatever activity you can. Track your progress. Even errands and housecleaning burn calories.
3. Pack your shopping cart with fresh produce and whole grains. Once they’re in the house, it is not difficult to build your meals around them.
4. Brown-bag it for a deliberate nutritional effort. You will be too full of good nutrients to do much damage if junk food comes calling. (or shows up in the staff room)
5. Make quality time with the kids activity time. Exercising doesn’t mean spending less time with the kids if you include them.
6. Look for low fat baking recipes if you want extra goodies. Another fun activity to do with the kids while teaching them proper nutrition. For a time saver, skip the baked goodies and trade them for a variety of flavors of whole grain crackers.
7. Limit even the good fat. Just because they are not bad for you, doesn’t mean they will not add pounds. Higher fat milk, cheese, and peanut butter can be included, but make sure to count them into your tracking and try to find low fat alternatives.
8. Track your eating and activity levels. (a free source is www.thedailyplate.com) The days that feel like two are easier to overeat on.
9. Count the midnight snacking. They’re calories even if no one else sees them. Save your especially healthy snacks for any night time eating to minimize the damage.  
10. Log enough sleep. This might mean going to sleep at the same time as your kids one night a week. If you get behind in your sleep, your metabolism will suffer and make staying in shape more difficult.

Remember that juggling work and family is the likely to be the most challenging time in your life. Treat yourself well while you do it.

The Recipe for Long-Term Savings Success

It’s a known fact that most Canadians don’t save as much as they should. According to a recent survey by BMO Financial Group, 70 percent of baby boomers said that they did not feel that they were on track with their retirement savings but they also said that they were willing to make sacrifices to get by.

So what are those sacrifices they will have to make? 83 percent said they were willing to put off retirement and work later in life than they had originally planned.  Others said they would refinance their homes or downsize to a less expensive residence, forgo owning a second property, retirement travel, or give up their vehicles.

The next question is – what do they wish they had done differently? 81 percent said they wish they had started saving earlier, and 91 percent agreed that saving enough to retire on takes a lot of planning and advice.

These statistics are frightening, however, there are so many little things you can do today that will change your financial future for the better.

The following are a few simple ideas to get you started and eventually win the savings game:

(1)   Open a savings or money market account with your financial institution and contribute to it on a regular basis. Many people don’t consider building a fund for liquidity purposes, but in event of an emergency or opportunity, this would come in very handy.

(2)   Go outside of your comfort zone. If you think you can save $100 per week, bump it up to $125 and see how that works for you for a few months. Experts suggest you save 10 percent of your income. If 10 percent is uncomfortable, keep in mind that a little bit is always better than nothing at all!

(3)   Every day, take a dollar – or $5 – out of your wallet and put it aside. Once a week, deposit it into your savings account. Another idea is to keep all your change and put it in a jar on a daily or weekly basis. You can’t imagine how quickly this will add up to hundreds of dollars!

(4)   Monitor your ABM withdrawals. Banks have significantly increased their fees, especially if you’re using private bank machines at places like convenience stores. Decide how much you will take out each week and make it last.

(5)   Picture your goal so that you can start focusing on what you are saving for.

(6)   List your credit cards, beginning with the one with the highest interest rate. Begin paying extra every month on the card with the highest rate, and when that one is paid off, move to the second-highest rate card. You can also try calling your credit card company to see if they will offer you a lower interest rate, or a special rate transfer.

(7)   If you have had the same term life insurance policy for some time, call an insurance advisor to see whether or not you could reapply for a new policy at a lower premium. If you reapply for the coverage and get a fresh medical exam, the insurer might see you as a better risk.

(8)   Enlist the services of a financial planner. A good planner will help you determine your future goals, review your current situation, and help you implement a plan that will enable you to reach those goals. Go to one of the following websites in order to find a planner in your area: www.advocis.ca or www.cfp-ca.org.

If you start with these basic principles, you will win the savings game. Every little bit you do today will result in great rewards down the road!

Good luck on your journey!