I work in an IT department. The hours can be demanding, the job often doesn’t conform to a rigid schedule, and it requires me to work many weekends. When my daughter was born, I decided that I needed to lift weights for the next 18 years so that I could be ready in case she decided to start dating someone on the football team. After my son was born, I realized I could stop lifting weights and just train him instead. But another goal came to mind. The goal was to be able to play in the yard with my children and (1) not be short of breath and (2) not risk a heart attack, no matter how much bacon I may have consumed.
I have spent the past few years doing what I can to attain that goal. I started jogging, began to pay attention to how much and what I was eating, and started making a real effort to have the best possible work/life balance. I am able to play soccer with my children, chase them on their bikes, and just have fun in the backyard. Every day is Father’s Day. Never mind having my career cut short due to poor nutrition—I do not want my life cut short.
Think about this scenario: you wake up in the morning, get yourself ready for work, and head out in your car for your morning commute. You do not bother with breakfast while at home, because you grab a cup of cream and sugar (and some coffee) with some coworkers most mornings. Unfortunately traffic is unusually heavy this morning, and it takes too long to get to the office.
Your poor nutritional choices lead to you becoming light-headed, and you lose control of the car and head into a ditch. Later on you find out how difficult it is to administer servers from the emergency room with a broken arm.
And that’s why I always drive around with an extra donut in my glove compartment.
If you do not believe that the preceding scenario is possible, then try this one: you are at your desk finishing up an extra-large sesame chicken dinner from that Thai place down the street that you think is healthier because it is Thai food and not Chinese food, but it’s really all the same. You fall asleep about an hour after lunch as if it were Thanksgiving all over again and you end up drooling all over your desk. Your boss stops by and snaps a quick picture on his Blackberry. You have no idea about the photo until your next performance review when he shows it to you and then says, “Now…about that raise you won’t be getting this year.”
Perhaps you are not the type to fall asleep after a large meal. At least, not that you remember, right? Well, let’s try one more: your steady diet with a minimal amount of leafy green items has led you to have low enough iron content in your blood to make you anemic. You are heading up to your office in the elevator one morning and you get a sudden nosebleed. You try to stop the bleeding but your blood does not clot as quickly as it should. The doors open, your boss is standing there, you bleed all over his shoes, and you make the elevator and office floor look like a crime scene.
Still think these scenarios are impossible? Well, they aren’t. Many people are either anemic or borderline anemic due to the lack of iron brought about by poor nutrition.
People fall asleep after large meals. And lots of drivers lose their concentration; there is no real way to know how many accidents are caused by low blood sugar, but I would be willing to wager that a good number are.
I know that it can be difficult to strike a perfect balance between your work schedule and your personal schedule. And often you will find yourself using work as an excuse to avoid taking time for yourself. But you need to make the time for yourself, and one way to do that is to be mindful of what you are eating.
MAKE THE TIME!
by Jonathan Gennick
It is so important to make the time. Your job will eat you alive if you let it. Taking care of ourselves would be easier if the penalties were more immediate. Imagine if your boss came to you saying, “Will you stay late and have a heart attack in order to get that new database created?” Wow! It would be easy to say no to that request. What’s hard is that each sacrifice is so small, so incremental. Taking care of yourself involves taking a very long-term view.
One of the easiest ways to be mindful of what you are eating is to keep track by writing it down on a piece of paper. If pen and paper are too rustic for your liking, then you can always get an application for your iPhone that allows you to record your meals and calculate your calories.
Writing down or tracking your meals will also help you to be mindful of, or eliminate, snacking. The bag of chips and can of soda in the middle of the afternoon is adding 350 empty calories to your diet each day. There are roughly 3,500 calories in a pound of body fat. With 20 working days in a month, that would equate to 2 pounds of body fat per month or 20 pounds of body fat per year. And if you think it is unreasonable to believe that someone is eating chips and soda for a snack every day, then just consider it to be done once a week, and that the 20 pounds gets tacked on over five years instead.
Believe me, five years can go by quickly. The weight will go on very slowly, but it will go on. And despite it taking years to go on, many people think they can take it all off in a matter of weeks. As a result, they get frustrated with any change in their daily routine that does not have immediate results.
The point is that you need to start putting yourself first; stop making excuses and start being responsible for your health as if your life depends on it, because it does.