November 2008

According to the Law of Attraction, whatever we think about we get – whether we think that we want something, or we don’t want it. If it’s part of our thoughts, it will happen in some shape or form.

If only I had known this years ago when I actually tried to go on a diet to lose a little bit of weight. If only I had understood that my great desire to lose weight only caused me to think about food more and actually gain a little weight! So when that diet didn’t work and I had resigned myself to being several pounds heavier – poof – I lost the weight in no time and only realized it when my pants were a lot looser.

So my theory on diets is this. Only go on the “no diet, diet.” If you want to be thin and fit, just start to believe and feel that you already are thin and fit. So when faced with food choices on the “no diet, diet,”  you will make good ones because you are already feeling “thin and fit” and once you feel better, you will not want to feel worse again.

With Thanksgiving almost here, people have started talking about food differently. It’s not just a holiday, it’s the holiday where we typically have our big meal at noon with the whole extended family. We all gorge ourselves on lots of delicious turkey, stuffing, green beans, sweet potatoes, pies, and cakes… If only we were bears preparing to hibernate and not eat again until spring!

This pattern of eating heavily from Thanksgiving through the end of the year conveniently leads into the next holiday as if Hallmark, the turkey farms, and all of the gyms dreamed up the idea of the New Year’s resolution to eat more healthfully, exercise, and lose the weight we had put on over the course of the last year.

I think it’s high time we reclaimed the holiday season to focus less on its commercial value and more on family and friends. So this Thursday, enjoy spending time with all of your extended family, and appreciate your family and all of the delicious food that you have to share this day and every day. By giving thanks for everything that you have received, and by this I mean to hold the thought lightly in your consciousness, you just might find that you are enjoying your meal even more, and not gorging yourself quite as much as you have in year’s past. So for your New Year’s Resolution this year, don’t worry about your diet, but rather pick something different that you’ve always wanted to achieve.

Most Americans consume too much sodium (i.e. salt) at an average of 4,000mg per day, almost twice as much as the recommended daily value of 2,500mg. Although the amount that each person can really consume depends upon the individual’s health and constitution, consuming less sodium will lower your blood pressure which can improve heart health.

In general, most people get 75% of their daily salt from prepared or processed foods. In order to cut back on the amount of salt you consume, try the following:

-    Use fresh and unprocessed foods instead of canned, frozen, or processed foods.
-    Read the nutrition facts label to find out the sodium content and select foods with less sodium than the alternatives.
-    Don’t add salt when cooking, try using more spices and herbs to add flavor instead.
-    Don’t add salt to your food once it is cooked.
-    When eating out, ask them not to add salt to your food when preparing it.

So how much salt is too much? If you are under 50 years old, your blood pressure is in a healthy range, and your overall health is good, you probably don’t have worry about how much salt you consume. However, if you are 50 years old or more, of African American descent, or have high blood pressure or diabetes, you should limit your sodium intake to no more than 2,300–2,400 mg a day. People with heart failure or kidney disease are advised to consumer less than 2,000mg sodium per day. (Source: Harvard Health Publications).

Although we do our best to control what our kids eat, the reality is that as soon as they’re about 4 years old, we start to lose that control. My daughter in Pre-K has lunch at school once a week, and my kindergartener daily. My girls eat what is offered since bringing a lunch from home is not an option at their school. The school tries to offer healthy alternatives and is continually working to make improvements, but that doesn’t change the fact that there are some things that are offered that I would only rarely let my kids eat, if at all. For example, if given the choice, I’d eliminate processed meats from my children’s school because I know they’re not good for you.

What I didn’t know until recently is, how bad for you processed meats really are. The World Cancer Research Fund and American Institute for Cancer Research’s “Second Expert Report” concludes that “processed meat is a convincing cause of colorectal cancer.”

The National School Lunch program, a federally funded program that often provides the best meal a child may get in a day, currently distributes and subsidizes processed meats like hot dogs to 30+ million children. Given the link between cancer and processed meats, it’s time to eliminate these meats from the National School Lunch program.

As a concerned parent who wants to make a difference, I’ve signed the petition to the Secretary of Agriculture requesting that the government halt the distribution and subsidization of processed meats like hot dogs through the National School Lunch program. Whether you have children or not, if you’re reading this blog you’re concerned about nutrition and health, please take a moment and click on the following link to sign the petition too. Thank you.
http://support.cancerproject.org/site/PageServer?pagename=usda_national_school_lunch_program_petition

Can you measure the value of a college education from the financial perspective of Return on Investment (ROI)? James Altucher, in his new book The Forever Portfolio, concludes that you cannot get a positive ROI on a $200,000 college education.

Altucher makes an analogy to the value of a college education to one strategy for winning the game of Scrabble.

“You have two choices. You can read every book you can find, build an enormous vocabulary, look up the definitions of words you don’t know (that will help you remember them better) and use your advanced knowledge, painstakingly constructed over years, to defeat all opponents.

Or you can remember the following five words: “xi,” “xu,” “za,” “qi,” and “qat.” “Ka” and “ki” are not so bad either. And every now and then “aa,” “ae,” and “ai” can prove incredibly useful. These are all legal words in the last edition of the official Scrabble dictionary. What do they mean? I have no idea. You don’t need to know… Once you are OK with the fact that “xu” is a legal word, then that means you can essentially slap that “X” down on a triple-letter score with much greater ease than any of your opponents really thought possible. While they are all stuck with their Qs and Zs, you’re racking up 50-point two-letter words and winning the game.”

Altucher states that college is too expensive, there is no value in a balanced education, and “there are far better uses of time”. Instead of college, he advocates working, getting good at one thing, taking ½ the fee of a semester to start a business, and getting involved with a charity.

All college students should do what he advocates while in college! A diverse college education will give young adults the skills and confidence they need to succeed in all of these endeavors. What’s the point of learning your multiplication tables if you don’t truly understand what 2×3=6 really means. Rote memorization and shortcuts are exactly the problem with our culture. There are no instant solutions. In order to make our world a better place to live, we need to think, feel, and understand why. We need to learn to question.

A college education provides motivated students the opportunity to live on their own without their parents’ constantly looking over their shoulder, develop their own group of friends from a larger community without family to pave the way, negotiate their own social relationships, not compete with their siblings on a daily basis, take responsibility for their successes and mistakes, take care of their own meals, home(dorm room), transportation, etc., try a variety of things to discover what they’re passionate about and what they’re not, learn to think on their own and to communicate, grow up and stand on their own two feet.

If our children can learn these skills while discovering what they’re passionate about, they will be happy in whatever they choose to do – and that, is priceless.

No one would argue that this is a difficult economy in which to grow a business. It gets to all of us, but the real challenge in many ways isn’t how to grow your business in this economy, but rather, how to keep your motivation level high despite the discouraging economy.

I discussed my personal values with my Entrepreneur’s Organization (EO) Forum last night (a small group of 9 Boston entrepreneurs who meet monthly to share experiences and learn from each other – part of a worldwide organization of 9,000 members). From this I realized that if I make sure that my actions are consistent with my values, I’m happy.

Sounds simple, but this is how it works (for me). One of my values is to “make a difference”. When asked last night what this means, I replied that it’s simple. As long as I feel like I’m making a difference in someone’s life, I’m happy. It could be as simple as opening the door for someone who has too much to carry, letting someone who is obviously in a rush cut ahead of me when driving, etc.

Given the economy, I decided to apply my values to my work at Zoe Foods. This lead me to rereading emails that Zoe Foods and I have received from its customers (i.e. you!). When I read emails from people who tell me that they love Zoe’s new crunchy granolas because they taste good and have great nutrition, I can’t help but think “Score!”. There’s another person I helped make a difference for today. So… if it makes you happy to make someone else happy, please keep the emails coming and commenting on the blog.  I promise that I will pay it forward!

Parents at my children’s school want to see the nutrition of snacks and lunches improved: hormone-free milk, no nitrates in the lunch meats, no deep fried food, no white bread or empty calories. No one would disagree with these goals as my husband and I work hard to teach our children to eat a variety of foods and make healthy choices. But teaching children to eat healthfully and providing them with healthy choices is only a small piece of a much larger puzzle that is important not to lose sight of.

We not only need to provide our children with healthy choices, but we need to teach them how and why we combine these healthy choices. Yet, the puzzle is still larger.

I believe we also need to teach our children to appreciate the wonderful choices that they have and the importance of not wasting food since it is a precious gift. When I was a child, my mom used to tell us that children were starving in Ethiopia and that we needed to finish the food that we had taken. As a child I don’t think I fully understood the implications of what she was saying, but it clearly made an impact on me since I recall her words 30 years later.

I am torn on this issue because I have been asked to participate in a group of concerned parents who want to improve the nutrition at my kids’ school. I would love to see my children have healthier choices with no fast or fried food. And yet spending my limited free time to help my children’s school is like tutoring a child who scored 90% on a test so that they can get 100% the next time. There are so many children who need much more help since they’ve only scored a 30%.

The National School Lunch Program provides $2.57 per lunch for over 30.5 million children, and for many of those children, that’s the best meal that they get. If I am to help my children’s school improve its nutrition, then at least I can make sure that my children learn that there are others less fortunate than themselves and that we all need to make an effort to help others less fortunate than ourselves in any way we can.

Although I didn’t want to make my blog political, I can’t help but say that I’m excited that our country has looked past color and race and elected someone who has vision, smarts, and the people skills necessary to move our country forward.

In order to make a positive change in our world, I think that the singer and songwriter Jack Johnson says it best:

With My Own Two Hands by Jack Johnson, featuring Ben Harper ?(repetitive refrains are edited out for brevity’s sake)

I can change the world
With my own two hands
Make it a better place
With my own two hands
Make it a kinder place
With my own two hands
I can make peace on earth
With my own two hands
I can clean up the earth
With my own two hands
I can reach out to you
With my own two hands
I’m going to make it a brighter place
With my own two hands
I’m going to make it a safer place
With my own two hands
I’m going to help the human race
With my own two hands
I can hold you
With my own two hands
I can comfort you
With my own two hands
But you’ve got to use
Use your own two hands
With our own two hands
With my own two hands

Is there such a thing as a sick day if you’re a mom? Oh, and why don’t you add to that, entrepreneur. I know there is such a thing as a “sick daze” – I’ve been in once since Saturday. Guess trick or treating was too much for me this year.

As a mom, your kids cannot just give you the day off. Even if your husband or helper has agreed to let you rest so that you can take care of yourself to get better – did you tell your kids that this was the plan? When they’re little, they just don’t get it. If you’re in the middle of a nap and you hear the stampede of feet followed by “mommmmyyyyyy” – so much for the nap.

Not to mention, in my house I’m the grand coordinator of everyone’s schedules and plans. Because I wasn’t feeling great, my husband took the kids when they woke up Sunday morning to have brunch with friends and then to the playground. By the time they got back it was well past noon. Since my head was feeling fuzzy, I didn’t even realize until dinner-time that one of my daughters missed a birthday party.

As for work, as a business owner, there really are no sick days either, just somewhat less productive ones. There’s only so much you can get done when your head feels like it’s filled with custard. And, if you decide to work from home because you don’t want to infect the rest of your team, your kids are thrilled. You then have the challenge of telling them that they need to let you work even though you should be in bed resting to get better. Now if that doesn’t send a confusing message! So… it’s now 4:45pm and I have not seen my kids since 1:30pm. Guess they got it after all.

Not really sure how that makes me feel, but it does let me get my work done. Now all I need to do is feel better so that I can get back to work and to my family!