This week has been a jam-packed week for me. I spent most of my time back at my client site outside of Philadelphia, with 50% of my day focused on work, 40% on sleep, and the remaining 10% on exercise.
I don’t travel often (thank God), but when I do I like to apply my life’s philosophy (“Keep it Simple”) to everything from packing to my diet. For a young consultant who spends much of his or her time on the road, in the beginning it can be difficult to say no to the “perks” of “free food” and the plentiful flow of alcohol. In my first year of work, I pretty much let myself loose when it came to food – I would wait till I was so hungry that I felt faint, then grab whatever I could reach first, be it pad thai or burger or sushi or Chinese stir fry. In my first year of work, I also gained at least seven pounds.
For a 5’4” Asian girl with a small bone structure, the result of this can be disastrous, especially when combined with irregular sleep and a lot of stress.
The turning point of all of this was when I took my first vacation trip in nearly three years to Barcelona. It was actually last year around this time, and Barcelona was brimming with life in the exact way that New York was not. Compared to the dirty, chaotic, fast-paced life we’ve come to associate with “urban living”, where people around us seem to literally be fighting for that extra second of time while taking immense pride in this absurd masochistic fulfillment, the people in Barcelona recognized what Elizabeth Gilbert had highlighted from her journey to Italy – “Dolce far Niente“, the Sweetness of Doing Nothing.
What astounded me wasn’t just that Catalonians knew what to appreciate life, but that they understood the time to do this was here and now. It didn’t matter to them that Europe’s economy was failing fast. It didn’t matter to them that they were living in cramped quarters with limited access to more money-making potential. The cultural difference between what I’ve always known was alarming – whereas I was raised in a culture juxtaposed between the Chinese relentless pursuit of excellence and the North American relentless pursuit of opportunity, Catalonians knew pleasure like Hindus knew peace. It was a way of life.
When I came back to New York, I suddenly realized that what I had called “living” wasn’t really living at all; my life was just an expansion of the busier, more messed up version of the grad school student life I had grown into, after all those years of fearing for my future and all the uncertainty that came with it. I kept thinking that because I was a student, “real life” had yet to start, so all this healthy-living stuff, as a corollary of “real life”, wasn’t worth paying attention to yet.
A couple days after I returned from Barcelona, I was at the Barnes and Noble at Union Square looking for recipe books, to recapture the fresh burst of taste in my food in Barcelona that I never got from eating out in New York. Like fate, I stumbled upon Daphne Oz’s book “Relish: An Adventure in Food, Style, and Everyday Fun.”
In her introduction, she wrote something that has come to define my motivation for living a healthier lifestyle:
“In many ways, I was waiting for my twenties to end because I assumed real life, and all the things I thought (and think) I want as a part of that life, would hit in my thirties and forties. The part of the equation I was forgetting is that to have that life down the line, you need to start living like you want it – laying the foundation, acting the part, doing the searching and finding – now. […] Relish is about adding a little something special that changes everything, about not only living in the moment but loving that moment, too. It’s about savoring highs and lows, gives and takes, and seeing that maximizing joy, potential, and growth while minimizing fear, worry or (gasp!) boredom begins when when you find that balance between effort and laissez-faire. Where you’re working towards something better but loving where you are and making the most of every day.”
So what does this have to do with the “sack of nuts”, you wonder? In my consulting work, I hate to be the person with “strategic insight” and then pump nothing concrete out of my brain. The same goes for this blog – now that I’m done with the wishy-washy “big picture” idea, now that I’ve got your attention, I’m going to tell you how you can start being healthier today.
It’s really quite simple. Just buy a lot of nuts, like pecans or walnuts, bake them for like, a couple minutes, store them somewhere dry while constantly keep a handful in a Ziploc bag and carry them with you everywhere. If you’re particularly eager, you can also mix it up by adding in some dried cranberries, etc. All grocery stores sell these things prepackaged, but to ensure this becomes a habit, I recommend getting them in bulk.
Until I started doing this, I had no idea of the plethora of benefits it would bring. It’s taken me years to realize this, but fundamentally, the conscious decision to eating healthy is a direct outcome of your perception of food availability at the time you feel hungry. If you’re at home and perceive that you have no easy access to food at the moment (e.g. your fridge is empty), you’re much more likely to order delivery or eat out. If you’re outside and perceive that you have nothing in your bag you can grab and snack on ASAP, you’re much more likely to go to the nearest place (and in New York this can mean Chiptole or Starbucks or the halal cart or a full meal at a restaurant) and indulge in food that has high sugar, high salt, and high cholesterol content.
Also, over time it puts a huge dent in your wallet.
So the bag of nuts solves a few issues: availability, immediacy, healthy content, cost.
And then, you know, you can pat yourself on the back and feel great, because you were good to yourself today.
Sincerely,
V.
Valoress 