Diet on the road
Mark – Guest author
It’s 6:00 in the morning when the cheap plastic alarm clock begins its obnoxious beeping rousing me from a fitful sleep of only about 4 hours. It’s my fourth or maybe my fifth day on the road in China. Sixth day? It all runs together after a while. Up until 2 a.m. replying to email from colleagues back home in the States, I still elected to keep the alarm set for 6:00 hoping that today will be the day that I actually achieve my goal of getting down to the hotel gym for a half hour on the treadmill.
But first … a quick glance at the mobile device to see if there are any important messages that came in over night. Of course there are. A half dozen or so of them with their obnoxious little exclamation points marking them as urgent. Well, it is just a matter of a few minutes to reply to these and a couple others I notice that aren’t as urgent but still should be replied to quickly. And now, curse it all, it is 6:30 and I really ought to go ahead and hop in the shower and get myself moving. I need to be already dressed when I start my 7:00 conference call or I’ll never be on time to meet my sales manager in the lobby at 7:30.
True to form the call starts late and then runs over which means I’m still on the call, my phone pressed to my ear as I follow my colleague across the lobby to the hotel restaurant for our first meeting of the day over breakfast. I’m irritable and starving and not at all interested in most of the items on offer on the breakfast buffet so I seek the comfort of the western breakfast. Two eggs, a side of french toast thoroughly drowned in syrup, some sort of bacon-like substance, a cup of fruit, juice and a coffee. And then another coffee. And then another. I tell myself that the odds of getting lunch are 50/50 at best so I’d better load up now in case I don’t get to eat again until dinner.
From the breakfast meeting to the car and we are off to our first customer meeting of the day, but not before I snag an apple and a bottle of water from the concierge desk – just in case.
The morning passes in a blur. I don’t understand half of what is being said around me, and find myself getting increasingly frustrated with the bits I do understand. These customer meetings are a crash course in advanced negotiation skills and it is true what they say – the best compromise is often the one that leaves everyone feeling like they got the raw end of the deal. As expected we won’t actually have time for a proper lunch, so we make a quick stop at a coffee shop (Starbucks is as prevalent in Shanghai as anywhere else in the world) where I get a large latte with a shot of vanilla to mask the burned beans and an oversized muffin. Because everyone else in our traveling circus is smoking I also suck down a pair of truly ghastly Chinese cigarettes with my coffee. Fifteen minutes later, fully caffeinated, sugared and nicotined, we are back on the road headed for one more customer meeting and then back to the office to debrief, write up our visit notes and prepare for our dinner meeting.
Dinner is a monumental affair, over the top in every regard with the intent of making the customer, one of the largest internet businesses in China, feel that we are willing to spare no expense to ensure that their every need is attended to. Dinner goes on course after scrumptious course and afterwards the liquor begins to flow in earnest. It is 11:00 by the time I get back to my hotel room, mildly drunk, exhausted and in absolutely no shape to go to the gym, if it hadn’t closed at 10:00. I take a shower to wash wake myself up and rinse the pollution from my skin. I grab a can of Coke from the mini-bar and at 11:30 flip open my laptop to get a couple more hours of work done. I glare at the alarm. Tomorrow I really will get to the gym, I promise myself as I turn back to the computer screen.
This was my life for eight years. In those eight years I packed on nearly 80 pounds. Sure, I would get serious about my diet from time to time and drop ten or fifteen pounds, but then I would get sucked into a three-week-long road trip and all my best intentions would go right back out the window as I drank and smoked and ate and sat my way into morbid obesity. Sure the airplane seats started to get uncomfortable but I was flying so much I just used miles to upgrade to business class or first and Voila! problem solved. Yes, it was tougher to catch my breath after running for a flight, so I splurged and bought myself a pass to the lounge and started showing up at the airport a little earlier to relax and have a drink before boarding.
It was a slippery slope and not one that is exclusive to the full time business traveler. We get busy with work. Our families have demands. That ever present mobile device chirps and chimes and buzzes at us throughout the day filling every second with those vitally important status updates, tweets, texts, and annoying but entirely inescapable cat videos. We reach the end of our day in a tattered, stressed-out ball of nerves and anxiety which coupled with a sugar-and-caffeine-laden diet prevents us from getting any meaningful sleep. So we lie there, awake and bloated and we wonder how long can we go on letting our health and our happiness slip away from us before we figure out how to make a change.
But really, there is nothing to figure out. It is simple. Turn the phone off. Leave the laptop closed. Make your first appointment of the day with yourself. Take a run (or a walk). Go lift weights. Grab one of your kids and head to the Y for a swim. Everything else can wait. It really can. Except your health. That cannot wait. That email confirming the price on the big deal you’ve been trying to close? An hour won’t kill it. Sending out your 100 Happy Days tweet? Your audience will wait, and who knows, maybe after an hour in the gym you really will have something to be happy about!
Resist the slide. Listen to that little voice that I ignored for the better part of a decade that told me that my excuses were weak, that nothing I was prioritizing was as important as my health. Sure, we all have those occasional days when the alarm bells really are ringing and you have to put the ordinary stuff on the back burner temporarily. But if you find yourself doing that every day.. ask yourself: How important can anything be if everything is urgent?