Choosing a priority: debt free or thinner?

This weekend I have spent a bit of time reworking my spending and savings plans to try to absorb some extra costs for dieting and exercise. I’m paying a monthly fee for Weight Watchers which I had not expected when I set my budget and I would also like to start Pilates or some similar exercise class. My problem is that when I realised the exercise class was another unexpected expense I was very reluctant to take it up.

My budget was worked out so that I could pay out all my debt by the end of this October as that was my highest priority. Although these extra costs are not large, I also have some expensive dental work this week which will deplete my savings a little and my 17 year old car is making some very alarming noises whenever I turn left. Consequently I am very reluctant to do anything that jeopardises the remainder of my small emergency savings. I guess I must really have learnt to control my spending if I am reluctant to commit to and extra $25 a week for diet and exercise help! The old me would have just pulled out a credit card without thinking but the new me has more self control (and also no credit cards). I know if I want to do this I have to rework my spending priorities but I am having real trouble finding this money from anywhere but my debt snowball or savings.

I’m in a bit of a quandary now and don’t know if I should rework my debt payout plan yet again and accept a longer time before I am debt free or try to exercise without any classes to keep me on track for late October. I really don’t know what to do so I’m going to procrastinate for a few days. Maybe I will feel better about the exercise class on payday when my bank account looks remarkably full…

One down, forty-two to go

My first week on the Weight Watchers program has been very successful, I’ve lost 1.1kg even though I didn’t do much exercise. I normally walk to work (~2km each way) most days but my schedule was crazy last week and I could only walk one day. I’m really pleased to have lost so much despite being a big sloth! This week should be better. I will be able to walk most days (provided I get up early enough) and I have a few more recipes to try out for the week so I feel pretty confident I can eat to the plan each day.

All the advice I have seen indicates that between 0.5 to 1.0 kg a week is the safest or best amount to aim to lose each week but I think losing more in the first week or two should not be a problem as I would expect to find it harder to lose the last few kilos. I’m not going to worry about it, I’ll just rely on the law of averages to sort this all out in the end.

Its been a great weekend and I’m feeling very confident about the week ahead. I managed not to break my diet in a Mothers Day splurge today, despite having a very big breakfast which my brother-in-law made for all the mums in his family. My very supportive daughter did not send me chocolates or cook books, instead I received a lovely new pair of slippers in the mail, just in time for what passes for winter up here in Brisbane. The one big benefit of the colder weather is that soups and casseroles (which are easy to freeze as leftovers) are much more attractive lunch and dinner options. My freezer is full of very healthy leftovers already, thanks to my careful planning last week, and I picked up a fantastic fresh pineapple today to round out the fruit bowl.

This week I am going to start looking around for regular exercise classes or activities I can join to help me improve my fitness. I expect there would be some yoga or pilates classes nearby but I’m not sure what else I could try that I might like. Some type of dance perhaps, if you don’t need to bring a partner, or maybe a walking group? I’ve never been the type to join group fitness classes so I’m not really sure what I might like. No time like the present to find out though…

In an unexpected turn of events…

Today I got up early, went out and joined Weight Watchers.

I’ve had plenty of success with my financial habit changing but seem to have really floundered around getting nowhere when it comes to changing diet and exercise habits. I seem to be very easily derailed from healthy new habits and have not really worked out what the triggers are that cause me to persist with my unhealthy habits. My regular walking stopped completely in March and my repeated attempts to follow the CSIRO diet have not succeeded. It just seemed way too hard to find recipes that could easily be converted to single serves or which were freezer friendly.

This week I decided that I had most success with managing my money when I set a budget and tracked it daily. If I carry those skills over to my diet and exercise that should mean that if I set a food budget and track it daily I will succeed. So, I’ve been on the Interwebs all week looking for a diet that I can manage just like a budget and I think Weight Watchers is my best bet. Their program is points based and they have given me a daily points budget I must stick to with a little extra I can use if I want somewhere during the week. They have both online and paper tracking tools and pretty comprehensive shopping guides. I’ve got a huge pile of reading to do and don’t really have any food in the house that fits the diet/budget yet so today is a bit of a wash out, but I hope to get myself sorted tomorrow and make a plan for the week.

My ultimate goal is to get back to normal size for me, which is around the size I was in this picture (thats me in front, with my now adult daughter giggling in my ear). I’d like to do this by my 50th birthday which is just over 18 months away. In fact it is about 86 weeks away which is quite convenient since I want to lose 43 kilos in that time. 0.5 kilo a week on average. I’m taking the view that I ought to lose more at first and then the weight loss should even out as I get into a routine and new habits. Rather like the magic of compound interest on your savings: the more you save early on the greater the cumulative effect and the faster the goal is reached.

I must try to set myself up a graph I can add to my posts to show my weight going down and savings going up. That would be great motivation!

Back on track and moving fast…

It has been a hectic few weeks since I got back from my holiday and I feel like I’ve spent them moving at breakneck pace until today. The lease on the unit I had been renting was due to expire on March 30th and I really wanted to move, for a whole lot of different reasons. In the two days after I got back from my holiday I had two open house events at my own unit and went out to look at a few others that were smaller, cheaper and in nicer locations. Luckily I found exactly what I was looking for and was able to sign a lease and move within a week! It was a whirlwind of packing, moving and unpacking and my expenses register for March looks horrendous with expenses almost twice my monthly income, thanks to the holiday and moving costs.

I’ve downsized from a two bedroom, two bathroom townhouse with air-con, dishwasher and remote internal garage to an tiny, old, wooden one bedroom flat with a shared laundry and garage. This might sound bad at first until you hear that I have nice, quite (non-student) neighbours and a shopping centre, parks and doctors within easy (and flat) walking distance. I’m also saving the not inconsiderable sum of $125 a week on rent (or $6500 a year!!)  plus hundreds of dollars a year on garden maintenance and utilities. And I am pretty confident that the nice people I now rent from are not going to be anywhere near as difficult as the last real estate.

Initially I started thinking about moving because I have been tracking my expenses and discovered that I spent more on rent than on anything else. In fact I live quite cheaply as I am trying to become debt free so I was shocked to see that the rent was 42% of my actual outgoings every month! The unit I was renting was nowhere near important enough in my life for it to take up so much of my weekly expenses, especially as I didn’t own it and couldn’t even hang my own pictures in it. What I really want to spend my money on is travel, so now that I have moved I intend to put the money I am saving on rent away in a special savings account. That $125 a week is going to pay for a very nice holiday for me at Christmas!

Needless to say the moving costs have wrecked my budget and savings, but I am not going to be thrown off by one little setback when I have been doing so well all year. I have written up my budget for April and am still planning to payout one of my debts this month and then snowball into the last debt of all. Even with the extra savings I am putting aside separately I am pretty sure I will be debt free by the end of this year, although possibly not as early as I had planned in September. This month I am also investigating ways to cut my weekly food expenses and stop wasting food. Every little bit of money I save will help my budget and every little improvement to my diet will help me lose weight and regain fitness.

After the excitement of my holiday in Tasmania I was out of the habit of walking daily and really noticed a change in my mood, and not a change for the better either. I also noticed to my amazement that all my clothes seemed to have shrunk slightly while I was away! Must be my washing machine, it also had trouble getting the stains out where I dropped one of the Pralines d’Anvers I’ve been eating in bed. You can’t trust some modern technology, my digital bathroom scales aren’t working properly either.

Anyway, I haven’t budgeted for new clothes this month so I’m off tomorrow to explore the walking tracks near my new flat. It would be good to shrink me instead of my clothes this month Hopefully I’ll re-establish my good habits quickly and by the end of the month I will pass another big milestone on my road to a debt free, healthy life.

New habit to learn – setting SMART goals

I started off this year determined to have goals rather than just resolutions and I’ve been pretty sucessful with my financial goals. I’m following the commonly recommended method of setting SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely. For my financial goals I have no trouble with this as it is relatively easy to work out an achievable and realistic savings plan and no trouble at all to measure it at the right time: if you have the right amount of money in the bank you’ve achieved your goal. I’m pretty good at basic arithmetic so working out how much money to pay of a debt each pay in order to pay it out by a set date is pretty easy. It’s also really easy to see how I am tracking toward the goal as my measures tell me where I should be at each pay day along the way.

The trouble starts with my goals around healthy eating and fitness. I don’t really have a SMART goal for my fitness and have seen so much conflicting advice on the “right” diet to eat that I have no real idea what I should be eating either. The only real goal I have here is to be fit enough to walk up the (rather steep) hill to work without getting out of breath, which I want to do by the end of this year. I know this will require me to walk a lot more and eat less to get fitter but exactly how much exercise and of what type will I need to do? I’ve been walking up that hill every day for 18 months now and am only slightly less breathless now than when I first tried it. Clearly just doing the hill once a day is not going to get me to my goal this year but unfortunately I don’t really know what will. This goal is not really specific and I am not at all confident it is achievable, particularly because I don’t have any way of measuring how I am tracking toward it during the year.

Since this goal is still too vague and difficult to measure I am going to try setting a series of other, more measurable goals around exercise that I can track and then I will see if meeting these will get me anywhere toward my main goal. I started out by creating a new habit of walking for at least 40 minutes on at least five days a week. I have managed to make this a habit very quickly and am really enjoying it so now I want to add another healthy habit. I have the CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet Book 2 which has an exercise program you can do with a resistance tube. This looks pretty good, is cheap and can be done at home (no expensive gym fees, equipment or clothes) so I am going to try it starting tomorrow. My goal is to work up to doing one full set of each of the exercises three times a week by the end of April. I’m even planning on taking the resistance tube with me on my holiday in two weeks time so there are no excuses for not doing the exercise!

I’d really like to try the diet as well as the exercise program but all the recipes are for four people and very few are easy to cut down, or re-use ingredients and leftovers. They are great books with shopping lists, recipes and well laid out weekly meal plans but unfortunately, like so many other diet books I see, they really don’t suit a single person a or frugal lifestyle. Any budding entrepreneurs out there take note: you could sell millions of copies of a weekly menu planning book that offered a singles a frugal, balanced diet with weekly meal plans, recipes and shopping lists! Hmm, maybe I should try making one myself as my next SMART goal…

Making new habits stick

I started this post ages ago and have just been spurred to finish it by this great article in the New York Times on shopping habits “How Companies Learn Your Secrets”. I have always been highly amused by the incredibly poor job Myer have done at target marketing to me. I don’t think they have ever sent me a catalogue, promotion or email that contained even a single thing I would be likely to buy, no matter what its price. They always send catalogues full of stiletto heels, makeup and skimpy dresses modelled by anorexic 12 year olds. No business clothes for fat women, no luggage or travel accessories, no sunglasses or stationery or anything I have ever bought from them. If they had spent any time investigating my habitual purchases, which they know about since I am a member of their rewards scheme, they would surely have made thousands of dollars a year more from me. But sadly they seem to do nothing whatsoever with all my data, unlike Target in the story by Charles Duhigg.

It isn’t the clever use of big data in the story that caught my eye though (even though I’m always saying big data will be the trend of 2012) but the explanation of how habits are formed and how to make new ones. This has been a very strong focus for me lately as I try to build new habits of exercise, healthy eating and sensible money management. I have a plan to make a healthy habit every month, and sometimes this will mean breaking a bad habit I have been doing for decades. In January I worked on creating a habit of regular exercise which I did with great success, even while travelling, right up until I got sick last week. I am almost better and intend to use the break, and the slight change in sleeping patterns, to my own advantage by switching to morning walks from tomorrow.

Now that I am in the habit of walking 4 to 5 kilometers a day and enjoying it greatly I am going to try to use my motivation to walk, and the reward of feeling good afterward, to break my early morning internet habit. This could be a bit more challenging than just starting a new habit. I don’t own a radio or television set but have five internet capable devices in my bedroom right now, three of them highly mobile ones that almost never leave my side. I use one of them as an alarm clock (my HTC Desire Android phone) and am in the habit of switching it off and immediately reaching for my iPad to do some early morning reading in bed. Reading that seems to have expanded to take up at least an hour, sometimes more, every morning. I blame Zite, and FlipBoard, and Twitter, and YouTube, and Google Reader etc, etc, etc. Of course I can blame them all I want but its pretty clear that the real source of the problem is me.

Flipboard (Photo credit: netzkobold)

I need to move more if I want to lose weight and the best way to do that is to spend less time lying in bed or sitting around elsewhere surfing the net. So from tomorrow I will start a new habit of getting up first thing and going for a walk. I am going to do this by both removing the enablers of the internet habit and by putting cues to my new habit close to hand. I intend to leave my laptop, MacBook Air and iPad in the cupboard of the spare room tonight and switch off the modem at the wall. That way there will be no WiFi when I wake up so I won’t be tempted to fire up the PC or go dig out the mobile devices. I will leave my walking clothes and shoes on the clothes basket in my ensuite so I see them the minute I get up and they are ready for me to put on. I have printed out a picture of the early morning sun shining through the trees on my usual walking path by the creek and stuck it on the wall opposite the toilet. I’ve written up my plan using the principles I learned from Change Anything, which I’ve mentioned before, and I feel pretty confident that I can do this.

I’m twice the woman I ought to be

If my bathroom scales were showing pounds instead of kilos I’d be fine. They’re not. I’m not fine, I’m at least 45 kilos overweight and have been for nearly ten years. This has really started to worry me lately though, as I have gradually lost my fitness through being too overweight to walk, cycle and swim like I used to. I walk into work most days and get out of breath only a few metres into the hill climb. I’ve also had chronic problems with both my ankles of late and I know this is mostly caused by the strain they are under propping up way too much of me.

I’d really like to regain my fitness and walk up that hill without puffing and sweating for half an hour afterwards. In fact that is another of my goals for this year: to increase my fitness so that, by the end of this year, I can walk up the hill to work at a normal pace and not get badly out of breath. And I’m going to do this by budgeting. I know a typical weight loss/fitness goal is achieved by dieting and exercise but I have worked out that my problem is not my diet and exercise. The poor diet and lack of exercise are the symptoms of my problem and my real, underlying problem is over-consumption. The poor diet is enabled by not controlling my money and the lack of exercise is a side-effect of too much internet, movie and book time and not enough nature time.

I always buy good quality, healthy food in my weekly grocery shopping but later in the week, when I get home from work late and tired and I don’t feel like cooking, I go out to the takeaway shop and buy something unhealthy to eat. I end up having a high intake of calories, fat and sugar and throwing away really healthy ingredients because they have gone off after languishing ignored and unloved in the crisper of my fridge for far too long. When I was a single parent and quite poor I had to eat healthy food I prepared at home as I could only afford takeaway meals once every month or two. Now that my income is so much higher I no longer have external restrictions on what I can buy and I have gradually fallen into the habit of spending money on food unthinkingly and uncontrollably.

Likewise, I don’t restrict the amount of time I spend on the net, reading or watching movies. I will usually start reading news feeds and social feeds shortly after I wake up and usually spend hours every day with a screen in front of me passively consuming content rather than having a life. I haven’t owned a television set for years and have always thought that people who organised their routines around the broadcast of their favourite series were mindless slaves of the broadcast network but when I consider my own internet habits I can’t see much difference except that I am enslaved to a few apps and websites.

Both these bad effects of over-consumption create a vicious cycle and breaking this is going to be a challenge. I am looking to my budget to help by forcing me to menu plan, buy only what I need, prepare it at home and resist the temptations of the takeaways shops. If I only go to the supermarket once a week I will spend less than if I shop every day. If I go with a list and stick to it I will not buy too much. If I pay all my spare money off my debts and restrict my food spending to a sensible amount I will not be able to afford unhealthy food choices. It is proving a bit challenging re-learning my old recipes and limiting what I buy, when and how often I shop.

It is proving easy to relearn my old habits of regular exercise. I have always been quite active and used to love my daily cycle to and from work along the Upfield Bike Path. I always found it improved my mood to be outside in the fresh air, even if it was walking home listening to my lectures on my iPod. This month I have been walking five days a week or more for between 40 and 50 minutes around Herston and along the Enoggera Creek Bikepath. The photo at the top of my blog is a shot from my phone of part of this beautiful pathway. Once I got started exercising at a regular time again I quickly became addicted and have really missed it when the weather has prevented me from walking. The regular hour a day of time after work away from all distractions has stopped me from brooding about things that get on my nerves at work and helped to improve my mood enormously.

Japanese Garden at Mt Coot-tha Botanic Gardens

Today the creek path was in danger of flooding so I went for a short stroll in the Mt Coot-tha Botanic Gardens instead. The Japanese garden looked beautiful and I was the only one out there in the rain.

I have a wall chart up in my bedroom where I record my weight every morning and the exercise I have done every evening. In the first 28 days of this year I have lost 2.1 kilos and exercised on 22 days. So far the plan is working, hopefully I can keep this up and at the end of the year I will be a shadow of my former self.