 around the world. This was our Singapore is the first chapter for Asia. In Singapore we've got about 3,000 members from a variety of backgrounds. Now she says globally it's focused on creative digital advertising, communications and marketing. But because of the fact that the future of work is very different in Singapore, we're seeing a blend. So we are starting to have women coming from technology. We had a couple of data scientists at our last event. We have a couple of teachers in the room. We've got lawyers. We've got people from a variety of backgrounds and we're always open to more industries. At the end of the day she says the goal is really simple. We want to see more women at the top. Vicky you pulled up an interesting set for IWD about how much women are getting paid in Singapore for every dollar. It's about 0.75. So we make 75%. So we want to actually see that go up and for it to be equal considering we do a lot more stuff in general. To kick things off I'll let Vicky introduce herself. Hi guys I'm Vicky. So co-founder of She Says Singapore. We've been running this for about six years now and actually we're now closer to the 4,000 members. Okay. Yeah. And I'm really glad to have new people and new faces here. Definitely say hi to our welcome committee and our She Says girls there in the yellow tag. So myself I run my own AI startup but I'm also the co-founder of Singapore and Southeast Asia's largest independent animation festival. So if you like cartoons definitely reach out to me. I also run and part of a programmatic agency. So if you're looking for digital marketing advice or anything like that please reach out to me. I'm Mira. I'm also one of the co-founders for She Says. During my day job I work in digital and innovation at Ascension. I focus on cities and transportation. I'm obsessed with my day job but I also founded a photography company last year which focuses on street photography in Asia. So I do both of those things. I quite enjoy it and we're quite lucky in Singapore that we have the ability to tap into communities like She Says to be able to help grow our business to help grow ourselves. I think last year or the year before I think we have five businesses grow from She Says from new partnerships and new friendships found and new passions as well. So now She Says is not complete without the volunteers and the people that you have working behind the scenes. So you've got July who's at the back over there and she's been quietly serving you your drinks but she's also one of our creative people. So she's putting together all the creative content. We've got Eleni who is our PR media and comms person. We've got Sam who's right there who pretty much runs our jobs pairing program. So if you are looking for a role of your recruiter and you're looking to meet more potential new candidates, Sam's a girl. So go and have a chat with her. We've got Alicia who is at the back and she's our creative lead and she built together our recently launched website and she manages all of our content. Virginie and Sarah. So Virginie is our new program director for who's your mama. She's right there. Virginie is kind of like the parent in this little group. She also is one of the leads at Hyper Island. So when it comes to any of the mentorship questions of you want to be a mentee, go and speak with Virginie. She has got the email under control. We know that you've been sending emails. We apologize to not be able to get back to you but Virginie is someone you can talk to. And Sarah is up on the staircase obviously and she is one of our partner leads. So moving on. Yeah so this event wouldn't have been possible without some of our great partners that we actually have on board and one of them is Jesco. So they have actually provided this amazing venue for us and Jesco is an amazing co-working space. I think about three or four floors in this building. So if you're interested to render space or to understand Jesco's business a bit more, feel free to reach out to the staff that's at the front desk. So the topic for today. Now it's I know that a lot of people are wanting to try and get tickets and this is definitely one of those sessions that we wanted to kick off. So just to start, who here had these like ridiculous goals of I'm not gonna drink this January. I'm gonna be super healthy and go to the gym every day. Yeah yeah I totally did as well. Well January is like that year where you want to try and kick off everything and you want to dominate everything. You've got all your goals and you've got the conversations going with your boss about what you want to do and how you want to nail life. But it's also about making things scalable. Beyond January what can you be doing next to get things going. Now before we actually get into the panel and our speakers, who we're going to introduce you shortly, I'm gonna throw up some stats which came from a Fitbit study on Singapore. 35 and 43. So what do you think the 35 means? Any chance? I'm just like I'm gonna do this. 35 hours? So okay so actually there were was it 43 countries? 46 countries. Out of 46 countries that were studied, Singapore came in 35th in terms of sleep, active minutes and steps. So we don't sleep enough which we already know that. But considering we have the number of gyms and access that we have and the amount of parks we're not making use of them and 43 is the number of sleeps. And so with the third worst country and who are the worst? India and Pakistan. Okay so Malaysia's the worst. So but India, Pakistan, Malaysia and the Philippines. So come on people like you've got beds, you've got good homes. Now the more now this study actually came from Singapore. One in seven people and you have more than seven friends have has experienced a mental disorder of some kind and a lot of people don't talk about it and one in nine are diabetic. Now chronic illnesses are actually growing in Singapore and what we want to talk about today is how can we mitigate that? How can you help other people who are in your communities be able to better address this topic? So I'm going to invite our speakers up onto these recently harness chairs. So we've got John from Fitbit, Wendy from Ufit, Luciana from F45 and Natalie from NattyLift. So if everyone can give us a round of applause. All right so I'm going to kick off with John. So we'll start off with the panel with going through a few questions and then after that we're going to open it to the floor where you'll be able to answer ask any questions that you might have. So just to kick things off. Hello and maybe if you could quickly introduce yourself what do you do and what does wellness mean to you? So my name is John Gilman. I'm the director of health solutions for Fitbit based here in Singapore. I'm Australian and I just want to say I've had already today a difficult audience. So I was having a conversation with my daughter who lives in Melbourne and was telling her that I was speaking at a women's forum tonight and there was silence and I said what's wrong and she said why is a man speaking at a women's forum? So just be nice to me okay. I've had a tough time. I've been in Singapore for three years. I was in the PRM partnerships role and recently moved into health solutions. I'm a very passionate Fit Bitter. I'm also I think probably a good person to talk about work-life balance. I got out like most expats I got out my boarding passes that I've collected in the last three years and I'm up to number 170 and I get on a plane tomorrow night. So you know work-life balance is incredibly important to me and you know the way I use my Fitbit is you know pretty critical to that. Hi my name is Wendy and I work for Ufit. I'm from Scotland but I've actually lived in eight countries over the last 18 years so I'm fairly adaptable. I can't speak any other languages so I'm really great with my hands. I've got four kids as well. I'm 44 and I believe that you can do as women anything you absolutely want strength training whatever it is. Nothing she told us back families wherever. We do need to juggle a bit more. I think we need to be more mindful of our time than men do but we can still do whatever we want to do. I think wellness is several things. It's not perfect for everybody. There's different dynamics for everybody so clearly for me nutrition is important and fitness moving doing something that you're passionate about when you move so that you continue to move and you don't run into a wall by the end of January. Social health as well so getting out having friends, having hobbies, things that interest you and clearly mental health too. So it's not just just one facet. I've worked in health and fitness pretty much my whole life. I also do personal training. Some of you might know me from Ufit book camps. I'm the one that screams the loudest. If anybody's doing the Spartan on Saturday they'll be doing the Spartan on Saturday. I'm going to be one of the warmer uppers. They don't need to give me a microphone but they will. I'm also running it too so if you see me stuck at one of the walls do please don't worry about touching my bum to get me over there because I'll be thanking you for it. I think we should just get out there and be social with our fitness and that's what keeps us going and keeps us active and keeps us turning up to those fitness dates with ourselves. My name is Luke Gianno. I'm a leader within the F-45 cult. Some of you may have heard of and I see a lot of familiar faces around this room. I moved up to Singapore almost three years ago. I've got some F-45s which I also manage in Australia as well. I came up to Singapore just because something new and different. I like the market. It's very transient. It's got a lot of young people who I'd say work hard, play hard to think is one of the things that we see up here that's both a benefit and a detriment to some people from a health perspective. Wellness to me is very much about how you feel. I mean like Wendy said there's multiple dimensions to what wellness is but I think overall if you don't feel well everything else doesn't matter and ways to achieve feeling well is either exercise, nutrition, just basically moving or like Wendy said being social. Hi so my name is Natalie and as Mira pointed out earlier I'm on Instagram. My Instagram handle is nettylifts and a lot of people like to just call me Natty. I'm a fitness enthusiast. I am a certified bootcamp coach and I sometime when I have some free time I work in a bank. Yeah I mean whenever people look at my Instagram they tend to just think I'm either a trainer or I work in a gym but I actually am very much like all of you guys out here. I work an intense job in a bank. I know what it's like to try and you know juggle, trying to be fit, trying to eat well and at the same time like you know the rest of life's commitments whether it's your family. When I was asked by Mira to speak on the panel and I looked at the rest of the panelists I just realized that I'm a consumer of one of their products or services. Yeah so I wear a Fitbit so that's John. Well the Fitbit tells me I don't sleep enough that I should maybe get a little bit more rest into my daily routine. My bootcamp certification is actually from Ufit so that's Wendy. Yeah it's small world and well I spend most mornings at f45 so I am one of those followers. But more importantly I think you know as I mentioned it's I think I can't relate to each and every one of you. I am just like every one of you seated out there like I'm trying to juggle a job and keeping fit and I think hopefully today we can all help to try and you know find that balance together. Great. Sorry. So when you just mentioned just now that you don't sleep very much so how many hours are we talking about because I know from my Fitbit that if I sleep more than five hours and 15 minutes in a night I don't function the following day. Are we really getting into this? Okay so John would probably hate me but I actually only get into bed around midnight and then in order to make it for my 6 a.m. at 45 class I wake up at 5 30 in the morning. So yes that's not a lot of sleep. I do try to get more sleep on the weekends even though I think John would disagree with me. There have been a lot of studies that say you know you shouldn't it doesn't work that way right like it it's not like you sleep less on the weekdays and therefore you make up and sleep 10 hours on the weekends. So Wendy's shaking your head. Yeah you can actually make up your sleep so if you lose your sleep it doesn't make any difference if you sleep 10 hours on the weekend you can't like put it in your back pocket. For women in particular really really affects our hormones which can lead to all sorts of problems with weight loss with fitness goals with mental health and I personally I make sleep a priority. I never get less than seven hours a night otherwise I literally cry and I also force it on my kids and they hate me because I make them have 11 hours night sleep a night and I always get but mommy my friend gets asleep until blah blah time I'm like I just really don't care. We go into your bed now because I just think it's just really really important and we pay a lot of money to to go and train and come to people like myself and Luciano. We do pay thousands of dollars on nutrition and fancy food etc and yet we're robbing ourselves of one of the most important things for our health and we can easily change that. I think technology now I mean we've got our phones by our beds it pings we check that message you can just wait to the morning really to be to be fair and I think it's super important you can't bag it for a rainy day. I'm just going to say we did the data that Mira showed before we've updated that for 2018 so Singapore has improved slightly now number 39 out of 46 countries Singaporeans sleep on average five hours and 50 minutes a night and we know that we have a hundred and forty thousand people with a Fitbit in Singapore and a large number of these people would have a heart rate device that is tracking sleep you know the interesting thing is we did a comparative study between with Duke NUS between people in Singapore Korea Taiwan Australia and New Zealand and on average people in Australia and New Zealand sleep an extra hour a night and the interesting thing for me I was in Australia over Christmas and the one thing that I really noticed the difference between Singapore and being in Melbourne for a month are the addiction to screens you know that people here are on their phones all the time you get on trains and say it and the researchers at Duke determined that the reason that sleep duration was lower in Singapore and this was based on their research was a lot to do with the fact that people here get into bed and are still on their phones so people don't put their phones down and I think you know I think screen time is a huge issue here and it's an issue that is getting worse and worse and just with sleep there's been a real there's been a sort of a shift away from you know looking at sort of some of the root causes for you know you know diseases like diabetes you know we focus on activity and we focus on nutrition but you know lack of sleep or poor sleep quality is is a significant contributing factor to a lot of chronic conditions and people are not necessarily aware of the role that you know having a good sleep plays in your you know your daily balance you know for me with my Fitbit my sleep is the most critical thing to me it's the first thing I check in the morning you know I look at how well I've slept I look at my average against other people you know if you if you want to get your life in balance sleep is the most critical thing and it's it's it's sleep quality not necessarily duration you know you need to focus on both so I'll turn it over to Wendy when it comes to women what are most women and then after I'd love to know that's perspective when it comes to a lot of the women who are coming to you and asking for advice when it comes to balance to exercise and to nutrition and wellness what are the key issues that come up and what are some of the solutions that you like you know there's always like a top three right that you would recommend to them yeah with most women I find it's time so they prioritize time for their families for their work for their husbands for their kids but they don't prioritize time for themselves particularly after having children even if you don't but particularly after having children time tends to become non-existent and everybody else's priorities become more important than than your own and at the end of the day you can't give your best if you don't feel your best so taking a time like an hour of each day to go and work out or meditate or do yoga or whatever your thing is Zumba whatever it is to make yourself feel better and just to reset will make you a much more productive human being in all the other areas of your life and I always get that I just don't have time I can't fit it in and it's like you just have to make that time it's never going to be available to you if you don't prioritize yourself and it's not selfish to say to your kids mommy needs to go to CrossFit because mommy just really needs to go to CrossFit because you come back and you're happy and you read their story and you put them to bed in whatever I think also women are generally so busy they're not really focusing on their sleep and so that affects our hormones much more drastically than it affects men's hormones which also affects our mental health as well whether we actually realize it or not and anxiety and depression is quite prevalent when we're not eating well we're not outside we're not exercising and we're we're not sleeping properly so that's the things that see mostly with women and it then is a lot harder to get through to women as well that it's okay to take that time for yourself when you say to a male client okay you need an hour a day to work out and you need to do this they find it much more easier to do women have always got much more guilt about these these sort of things let's say yeah following on from what Wendy just said men are a heap more selfish so no we are and so like when when we want something we just oh god I could watch what I say when we just we don't we don't we're not very empathetic we don't really think about how it's gonna affect others quite often we get we get women from almost all walks of life a lot of mums and things like that but then people have really focused on their careers they're really focused on that you know their social group you know Singapore being a place where there are a lot of transient people you know some sometimes new people move to town and people want to bring them on board and you know involve them in things and people spend a lot of time thinking about other people so what I find happens is people in women end up spreading themselves too thin and as a result they don't focus enough on all the aspects you know whether it's movement nutrition just meditation or they kind of try and do everything with 80 and try and fit too much in when they should really be sort of taking a more concentrated look at the things that actually are really helping or making them feel good or making them healthier and then focusing more on that so I think it's I think it's a it's a tendency to sort of give too much to too many and not focus enough on themselves as the root cause of a lot of the issues we see hopefully everybody can hear me so you know I think everyone when we start like our new year and especially for me like Mira's really in our F-45 and our fitness I started getting a bit into it like in August with like we bar and you know I found something that I quite liked but I think that a lot of us or at least by self what I struggle with is like how do you even start and how do you really find that time and make that time for yourself and what's your advice for people all of us where we're trying to create our own new year resolutions and how do we actually make that sustainable okay well so with regard to that question I when I talked to a lot of women or even my colleagues in the office one of the key issues that often come up is I don't have enough time to work out and we all have 24 hours in a day maybe some slightly more than others because we sleep less but I think when I first started working I did realize that I didn't have enough time to work out like I mean subjectively not enough time because if you're working a night of five job or a night at 7 p.m. job by the time you leave the office it's close to 8 p.m. you are tired you don't have enough energy to go to the gym and then you think about if I go to the gym now I would end up only going home at 11 and I still have to grab dinner and then the whole cycle repeats because you're constantly tired and it's it's just not sustainable and then I discovered at 45 it helps me get up in the morning it's only 45 minutes I mean so it's I feel like it's some time that I have to myself before work starts because I mean you go to the office your start time for work is always fixed as if it could be 8 30 it could be 9 and maybe some traders may start working at 7 I mean there are people who come to at 45 for the 6 a.m. class because they have to be in the office by 7 a.m. in the morning so it's still possible it's more of what you prioritize as like important to you so if you know you prioritize wellness and your own personal health and fitness you will find time to you know to go to the gym to eat well and on the topic of eating a lot of women often also say like oh like I don't have enough time for lunch because I only have say one hour if I want to go to the gym over lunch I don't have enough time to buy something healthy you know all these excuse excuses I think because I think if you don't make it intentional to say I'm gonna eat healthy I'm gonna buy a salad I and you would end up eating something unhealthy later on in the day like if you're hungry and you walk past muffins at the shop selling muffins you know you're gonna pick up that muffin if you walk past the shop selling cupcakes come on like let's face it you're not gonna be able to resist that cupcake in the window because you're like I'm so hungry I just need something right now right so a lot of us just take the easy way out like if you if you don't place a priority on like your health or your fitness and your nutrition then it's a lot harder to carry it through like to do for the rest of the year yeah going back to food I think one of the most common things so I'm a huge fan of going to a hawker center for lunch I like my young tofu I like my fish soup I don't like salads at lunch because they're cold and I don't like cold food at lunch now the misconception that a lot of people have I guess is eat to eat healthy in Singapore requires a lot of money and it's expensive you've got programs like you know that deliver your food for you but I for me personally I refuse to spend $20 at lunch on fried beef mints with all with coconut oil I just I'm not gonna do that I'm gonna spend $7 on young tofu and just buy too much vegetable but what do you think when it comes to keeping healthy food options and you know when you look at the look the food that you have in Singapore what what is there to choose from that works okay so I guess for most people who work in office job like most of the time for lunch you get an hour right and it's a choice between do I want to hang with my friends over drinks and like good food burgers or do I want to go to the gym or perhaps I just want to pick up like a salad and sometimes it's a toss-up between what I want to be healthy or what I just want to like have you know have that burger and drown my work sorry well I guess for with regard to Mira's question when you go to a hawker center there are a few items that are on the healthier side like so if I do go to the hawker center I try not to order stuff with too much oil and I think the key thing is also understanding like your macros like understanding that if you're working out a lot you want to ensure that you have sufficient protein Wendy probably can elaborate a little bit more macros but when I do go to a hawker center I try and pick something that would be healthy so less oil less salt you know all all of these things are things that you can control you can tell the person who is making your meal like I don't want so much oil and that's something I often do you can pay more for vegetables like what Mira said because we always need more fiber known diet if you know you don't want to eat that many carbs at lunch you might want to say pick up more protein instead of like buying a fried a plate of fried rice or fried noodles because from a macro standpoint that's not very healthy yeah I think that from I mean from what I've gathered it's like also like pretty much like cultivating really good habits essentially that is sustainable so you know sleeping early eating well choosing the right types of food even when you're at the hawker I feel like that's quite achievable especially from myself at least when I do it with friends or like communities I mean from each of you do you have any communities to recommend or any you know how how should we build this kind of social network to to encourage each other apart from I mean of course joining the gym and building friends there too like any other advice around that so for me I'm you know as I'm from Australia I've been in Singapore for three years I would disagree I think it's very easy to eat healthy here at not and you know not a high price like I would never pay $20 for a salad for lunch for instance I think for me it's about personal choice and it's about priorities and balance and I think it's very easy to talk about balance it's often hard to do it but it depends what what you want to do what what do you want to achieve and the easiest thing is to say no I don't want to do that I'm going to go and have you know some kind of curry from a food center you know it depends on what your personal priorities are and you know what you want to achieve in life you know I work for Fitbit and this thing here is you know it's a device that tracks my activity but it doesn't tell me what to do it doesn't tell me to walk it doesn't tell me how to sleep it just tracks what I do and and the personal motivation for me is about self improvement and and you know looking after myself and getting that balance because I do travel a lot I you know I you know spend a lot of time you know away from home or from my apartment here you know we talk about communities in in the Fitbit app there is a social network which is called Fitbit feed in Singapore roughly about half the people who have a Fitbit are interacting with each other in the social network and it's a it's a very it's a great way for people to you know post their Fitbit experience or their Fitbit story the number two item in there is food so what we see is people are looking for ways to eat more healthily and I think a lot of people genuinely don't know how to do that you know there's easy solutions you can go and buy food in from somewhere you know I think as a company we focus very heavily on nutrition and we focus on helping people to achieve their personal goals and I think you know a lot of people like you know Natalie talked about macros you know there's a lot of people who would have no idea what that means but still want to eat healthily you know and it's it's about you know a pathway to do that how to how do we as an organization how do these guys because you know they're not just offering a service here they're offering a way for people to self-improve you know how do we do that so that people can actually find and access information that is is meaningful you know it's we watch TV shows that you know feature these incredible cooks that are doing amazing things you know most people don't eat like that it's very easy to go to the supermarket and buy some things and make a salad at home it's about it's about education and it's about you know your own personal you know desire what you what you want to achieve here and and whether you're willing to actually to do that got a few things to say about this sorry please tell me to shut up if I go on for too long firstly I don't really believe in New Year's resolutions and nobody likes a skinny sober woman anyway we're much better we just be our real selves and try and be the best version of that it's all about small steps so first of January we're all gonna stop drinking we're not gonna drink so much coffee we're gonna sleep more we're gonna lose weight we're gonna exercise oh my god my heads it's blowing just thinking about it so it's just one step at a time so it means that you don't have a latte on the way to work every morning you have a black coffee instead if you make a healthy lunch choice once a week instead of every single day if you exercise on the weekends whether that be you go for a really long walk along swim whatever that is just make one step at a time if you have if you set yourself to run a marathon and you've never run before that's a huge commitment if you do a 5k then you do a 10k then you do a 15k I have people come into me all the times and I want to lose 20 kgs I'm like well it's a lot of weight number one so if you're setting that marker for yourself and you lose 15 kgs what does that mean that means you're a failure because you didn't reach that 20 kgs that you want to lose but 15 kgs is absolutely phenomenal it's a huge amount of weight so do each bit step by step by step don't have these massive goals that then makes your life more difficult things like sleep hygiene for instance is is super important so I'll put my phone down at 9 I'll brush my teeth at 9 30 I'll make sure I'm in my bed by 10 45 I'll read for 15 to 30 minutes and then every night I'll put the light off it to 10 15 the first few nights you'll be lay there wondering what your phone's doing with their eyes wide open you know all sorts of stuff going through your head the third night you'll be asleep and then you'll start to feel better and then it becomes habit and you know it just becomes part of your life so it's just doing the these small things at times I'm also not a big believer in counting anything whether it be macros or calories or whatever because one size doesn't fit all and there's algorithms for all these things and it doesn't necessarily fit us or our personalities or our lifestyle it's about making healthy choices and eating as much unprocessed foods as possible I like to call it the Nana diet and what did your Nana do like 60 70 years ago she certainly wasn't eating Cheerios for breakfast she wasn't having McDonald's every other night but she managed and she didn't have a car and she didn't have this and she you know she'd buy her food every day and prep it's not possible to make all your meals from scratch but there's so many great options now with is Uber Eats still in does that still go or what is it grab sorry you know so you can get these things delivered for a reasonable price also there's places like Sun and Moon in Telak here I'm gonna shout out because I get my salad from there every day $7.50 and you get a big lump of chicken and you have to tell her to stop squeezing the mayonnaise on because she ain't giving up you know they're there you can go to cold storage buy a whole chicken for like what $5.99 that would cover like two three meals you don't have to be perfect all the time you don't have to make these goals so massive that you'll never achieve them don't listen to sorry hun Instagram accounts so much because just the heads up 90% of it's not real our accounts clearly are but everything else isn't so you need to just you know be yourself and not make your goals other people's goals and just know that what you're doing now is enough if you feel happy it's enough you don't need to do anymore I think it's people set them up set themselves up to fail from the beginning because I think when people look at nutrition 80% of people they frame it the wrong way so what they look at is what they can't have when really should be focusing on what you can have and when you focus on what you can have you should look at what should I have for performance for longevity for health so if you turn away the turn around the way you think about foods you will when you eat it you'll feel good right like you won't be thinking oh god I'm missing out on this you'll be like hey I just did that for myself I feel really good about it and then when you when you turn it like that there are heaps of real easy like low-lying fruit taking magnesium take two magnesium pills you feel like you're nailing it right so it's it becomes a lot easier to justify a lot of your decisions and then yeah maybe you do have to spend a little bit more money on a nicely made salad somewhere because that's just how you view food for yourself now you view food as fuel you don't view it as like a you know a break from work it's something you eat because it's going to make your afternoon better more productive and I think that's sort of the first step in making sure that you eat well something that helps supplemented is certainly training because if you're gonna you know make yourself go through 45 minutes of hell or something that you really find quite unappealing initially you're gonna be much more likely to make that healthy choice because you've just suffered for 45 minutes so I think exercise and food really go hand in hand because they keep the other one in check it's the same as if you eat really well you know you're going to want to train because you're gonna be feeling good and you're gonna feel like I've got of nutrition myself and a certain way because I've got training this evening so I'm gonna go to training you've had your protein shake three hours before you've had a creatine shake a bit some BCA's again all low-lying fruit because you put in a shake you shake it you drink it once you've done that you're primed because you've done it three hours time you know it's time to go to the gym because you've done the lead-up it's sort of they they support each other I think we're just just going back to food I think that a lot of people here have been in the situation where I know I've done it where I've had a massive night the night before or I sorry but so on the the following day I'm like oh I feel that I'm putting on weight so I'm gonna go to the gym work out a ton and then not eat properly from your perspectives I think that all of you have somehow other seen the impact of what I guess it sort of follows on to what I was saying before like foods nutrition it's not a break from work it's not like 12 o'clock I should eat sometimes you are not feel like eating so you just you don't eat right like if you feel like eating you should eat with regards to consuming food though you should be looking to consume foods that are good for you so if you are hungover you know salads and stuff are not appealing if you do eat McDonald's for breakfast or lunch you should make it a point of having a very healthy dinner but there's nothing wrong with eating unhealthy food occasionally like it's like the doesn't say balance it's a dump balance before but it's all about balance right if you if you've had a massive night the night before and you know you're not gonna be training the next day because you really shouldn't be training if you super super hungover use that opportunity to have something that you maybe would consider a treat pizza McDonald's burger joint whatever it is but then once you've had that meal that's where it stops you know dinner doesn't become the same thing and then the next morning doesn't become a flow on from that you want to you sort of want to set yourself limits so you don't want to restrict but you also at least want to have like a level or somewhere to stop similar and what we do consistently is what shapes us not what we do occasionally so if you go and you have a big night and you consume food that you wouldn't normally eat and don't be guilty about it I think the guilt factor that we put in ourselves oh my god we had no McDonald's or whatever it is that you had then sort of like spirals of control so you just put a full stop at the end of that sorry situation and move on to the next chapter okay it's not a big deal once in a while it doesn't really affect us we're all humans first and we're trying to do our best in every situation that we can so just having that one bad meal as you see it is is not going to affect what you've been doing in a consistent manner for for the rest of time and no food is bad every food has its place in our lives at a certain time it's just if we overdo that consistently and that means healthy food as well so we can get too obsessed with having organic this organic that or just eating salads or I'm only going to have this all the time that's becoming a huge problem in society now getting too obsessed with clean eating it's okay to have a burger or fries or a pizza once in a while it's about changing up and also if that made you feel happy then that's also a win okay it's not just about how we're fueling ourselves with nutrition yes of course we need to give ourselves the right vitamins and minerals and all the rest of the good stuff that makes us functioning people but also a bit of joy when you bite into that nice piece of cheesy bread this is me we're talking about and is also good for us as well as long as we're not making that a consistent habit I think that the key idea is actually all about sustainability so oftentimes when you have a big night then some women the following day or even some men decide that oh you know just because I ate like 3,000 calories the day before today I have to starve like you know I have to work out to burn off all the extra calories from yesterday and compound effect I can't I can't eat like for the entire day so that you know I'm actually burning all the calories ate the night before and I think it is not healthy because from a sustainability point of view you know if you're starving yourself if you're only restricting yourself to either chicken breasts and you know bought chicken breasts and bought broccoli from a sanity point of view from emotional and mental point of view like it's going to be very detrimental and difficult to sustain it throughout the rest of the year or like the years ahead so often in January people have all these new resolutions like I'm going to eat clean I'm going to have a dry January as Mira pointed out earlier on and then you have a big night out you know someone's in town or it's a friend's birthday and then you feel terrible about yourself because you broke that nearest resolution right and I think a lot of us can you can relate to that because I definitely have been there at some point in the past and I think the key thing is about sustainability it is okay to have waffles it is okay to have ice cream you know every once in a while like it's okay to have chocolate I personally don't think you should restrict your food groups from personal standpoint a lot of people think I only eat salads for lunch and salads for dinner and maybe eggs for breakfast but that's not true on the weekends or even if you you know you do come out for a dinner or lunch with me you do see I love barbecue I do indulge in truffle fries so I think it's a lot about sustainability and if that keeps you sane that helps that helps you keep going you know you can make healthy choices at some meals but at other times you can you know afford to let yourself go a little bit you know indulge in whatever makes you happy so we talked a bit about like clean eating I'm not really sure but like does detox really work you know but I read so much about it so I tell me about it has anyone I know one person here who uses a detox tea I've seen her using it but is there anyone who's done the detox tea or like that juice cleanse yeah yeah it ain't fun is it you got real hungry yeah I did too I think the themes been quite common as we say it's like a sustained effort so detox your body has this setting it's like homeostasis it's when it maintains a level you know acidity in your stomach for those people like the alkaline things and blood pressure and temperature that's your body at its optimal and everything you put in your body that uses or mitigates so that you remain there you don't just drink a cup of tea one day and it's all of a sudden you're absolved all of the bad things you've ever done so short answer there's a lot of fads out there the bottom line is in health and fitness people want to make money as well as in selling foods too so you know we've got you've got the marketing for various food companies that make things sound wonderful and healthy and it's not true and the same is is we can say the same thing about the health and fitness companies as well right so there's always a fad I believe in just keeping it real and one step at a time I'm the realistic nutritionist I had a damp January rather than a dry January so you have to be real to yourself we do a program called clean and lean I'm not trying to plug it I'm just this is pertinent to what I'm about to say people come off sugar it's not the detox that's causing them discomfort it's the coming off the dependency of that particular product if they're over consuming it nothing is bad in moderation but when you over consume it your body becomes dependent on it and coming off of that dependency is what's the the brutal part we never fully detox and neither should we it can be quite dangerous actually we do need some toxins in there to be human beings and they're attacking us from everywhere so we really can't do it I'm not a massive fan sorry if anybody has a business doing this of juice cleanses because I think you're actually putting in a very high amount of sugar into your body but more importantly the nutritional value of the juices is pretty much been oxidized by the time that you consume it unless you made it and drank it on the spot a lot of the benefits of that juice vitamins and minerals to be quite frank no longer exist by the time you consume it and so it's sort of a placebo effect now that makes you feel good there's nothing wrong with a placebo effect but just just know what you're you're actually you're actually doing if you just try and eat reasonably and moderately consistently that's a lot of big words there and then you'll see the health benefits rather than just trying to do a short fatty thing for a short period of time which is probably not going to make you feel that great I just have one thing to say about like juice cleanses they taste pretty nasty so I have gone personal experience I have taken a juice cleanse for three days it was not fun I mean it was bottles upon bottles I think I had eight bottles per day different colored bottles you may start with a relatively fairly nice tasting maybe it's an orange or a lime and then there's some bottles that are just pure vegetable just all green and it was a struggle to finish it and how they often tell you is you know you have to drink only the juices for three days straight and you lose weight right it's supposed to help with detox it's supposed to help you clean out your insights and then you're supposed to come out from the whole juice cleanse lighter and supposedly happier and you're already to start like your new year's resolution with like a healthy diet etc I guess the point here I'm trying to make is when I went on the juice cleanse it was not fun and I think a lot of the so-called weight that you were losing over the three days was just because you were starving yourself I mean as Wendy said it's very little nutritional content in a green juice that's maybe barely any calories in a green juice because even if you look at vegetables which the juices are made from they barely contain any calories so literally throughout the entire day the only calories you're containing your drinking is maybe less than a hundred most from the nut milks or whatever else the sugars that are inside yeah so I really don't believe in a juice cleanse so I mean just in terms of the the whole macros thing I generally don't understand it I'm at 30 I think what how I think I'm 33 yeah 33 34 I'm sorry I generally I'm not going to try but what I do use is my fitness pal because I think it's really great because actually more than anything actually forces me to drink water because Alicia and I work together this is a really bad thing but Alicia's already smiling so one of the things that was my goal for this month was to cut down my diet coke intake because it's actually real bad I have I used to have like three or four cans a day because I don't drink coffee all right so there's a thing but anyway moving on but yeah so I was like that was a goal for this month but I think one of the things that actually comes across with everything that all of you are saying is we need to find structure when it comes to maintaining balance when it comes to making sure you get the results be it from a wearable or you know going to the gym and seeing your weight drop so with Luciano you f45 I actually really enjoy f45 because it gives me structure so I'm in there with that most mornings at 6 and the reason why I like doing the 6 o'clock is because it forces me to go to bed late instead of sitting out on club street and having an apparel spritz till like midnight which is really easy and also eating really bad food but now with in terms of structure how important is that when it comes to fitness and then also then turn it over to John when it comes to the insights that you get from tracking it how do you how do you think that people would be able to get the data back from what they're doing when they're an f45 class or any gym class for that matter and how important is structure in your gym sessions as well as nutrition to move you forward I guess you know if you're looking at structure what you're essentially looking at is planning structure structure is just planning later down the track so if you want to be successful and have a successful training regime or you want to have a successful meal plan it all starts at the very beginning when you decide what you're going to do what your objectives are and then what you're going to do to meet those objectives so with your training regimen if you decided you want to lose weight so you design your training regimen around that you would plan out which days you're going to attend and how long you're going to be there or what exercises you're going to do all of this will be written out at the beginning the reason is because if you just went in and you just winged it chances are you're probably not going to do a full program or something that would be beneficial you're also going to not do everything you're not going to do everything to the fullest extent but the good thing about having everything planned and written down and decided for when you're not tired or fatigued or just don't feel like it is you can just give up and surrender to what you've written down and do exactly that because when you have a tendency to do it on the fly you make allowances for yourself to not do what you planned whereas when you plan it and it's structured and you know you're going three days a week every week for the next three months and you know exactly what you're going to be doing every time you walk into that gym it's very hard to make excuses as to why you shouldn't do it because you've written it down you've done this to meet your objectives so when it comes time to do it you just have to think well this is what I was planning for all I have to do is do that and then it's it's a lot easier to achieve than if you're just making it up on the fly so Fitbit does two things we make trackers and we make smart watches and they you know fundamentally track your activity one thing that Fitbit also does is create a lot of PowerPoint and I remember seeing a presentation that our our CEO the guy that founded the company 11 years 11 years ago gave at one point and had a picture of three machines on the slide picture of a plane a picture of a car and a picture of a human being and he talked about the number of sensors in a car there are literally dozens of sensors in a car and the number of sensors in a plane there are literally thousands of sensors in a plane that are tracking every single thing that that plane is doing you know you wouldn't get in a plane you know if you were not 100% convinced it was you know it was going to be able to fly human there are no sensors so basically we are the most complex machine and yet we really don't have a way or before trackers came along there wasn't really a way to track our heart rate to track our sleep to track our activity to track you know a whole bunch of other things and they're becoming more and more sophisticated so this one on my wrist is capable of tracking sleep apnea now sleep apnea is a hideous disease you know people basically stop breathing during the night and and really the it's not curable and really the only treatment is a very invasive you know oxygen mask it tracks atrial fibrillation so they're getting smarter and smarter they're tracking more and more the biggest trends in healthcare prevention and personalization so you know there's been a fundamental shift in the way that you know basically everybody is looking at medicine you know a little while ago it was about I'm sick I go to the doctors and that's basically what we did you know when we were growing up you know you're not sick go back to bed you know that the whole premise for healthcare is changing and it's really being driven by two things it's it's fundamentally being driven by the fact that healthcare costs are spiraling out of control you know governments companies that organizations that provide healthcare just simply cannot afford to keep funding the way it's going so governments are looking at prevention the second aspect is and it relates to everything we've talked about you know there is an explosion of chronic diseases so the government in Singapore has has declared war on diabetes there is a there is a very serious issue in this country with type 2 diabetes Malaysia has an even more chronic problem because of the diet and you know they're not from data that we see they're not an active population there are more died though there are more type 2 diabetics in India than there are in the rest of the world and the government there believes that about 90% of people in India don't know that they have type 2 diabetes so chronic very serious issues that that you know ultimately kill people we know from work that we've done that 80% of type 2 diabetes and 80% of heart disease and stroke is preventable if you are reversible if you take greater control of your life and that's what it's all about so I'm you know I work for Fitbit I probably wouldn't have bought one if I didn't work for Fitbit but you know I'm fitter and healthier than I've ever been and it's about for me what I want to get out of life you know I don't want to die of a heart attack you know when I'm in my late 50s or my early 60s you know I don't want to have a stroke I don't want to get type 2 diabetes you know my niece has got it and she is in casualty almost every four or five weeks because she just cannot cope with managing the disease you know that the message here is it's hard but it's also very easy and it depends on what you want what you fundamentally want out of life if you want to be fitter and healthier you know it's okay to go out and have a big binge and have a hangover so you know you can't get out of bed the next day and you need to have KFC there's nothing wrong with that as long as you're getting balance in your life and you're being true to yourself you know that's the most important thing the easiest thing is to delude yourself into an outcome it's also very easy to do the opposite if you want to be in control of your life if you want to be fit and healthy there are plenty of ways to do that and you know we now have technology these things that make it easier than ever to understand you know how you're tracking how you're going what you're achieving you know if you're getting into bed and the first thing you do is pick up your phone and you're sitting there looking at your phone for an hour you really only have yourself to blame if you're not getting a good night's sleep you know if you're honest with yourself if you're really focused on what you want to achieve you know it actually can be quite easy if you are willing to do that I think that's quite interesting so Fitbit's allowing you to actually track you know your fitness and your patterns and to actually help you build structure around it and you know a structure that actually works for yourself Natalie what like you know you work like a really really busy job so how do you actually find that structure make it work for yourself okay so with regard to structure actually I find that it is much easier to keep yourself accountable if you have someone to keep yourself accountable to so it could be a friend it could be a parent it could be your gym buddy so a couple of months ago I actually attended a seminar from Thrive Global so the seminar was the content and the agenda for the whole seminar was similar to today it was just about trying to help you find balance it was trying to help you find your ability to do things that you want to do in your life that's something that you want to change so a lot of people had things like I want to be fitter I want to go to the gym more I want to eat healthier I want to be healthier I want to sleep more I want to be able to be more social and what the seminar helped us do was to conceptualize that into something more tangible so like if it's fitness related it could be I want to make sure I go to one extra gym class every week or I want to make sure I get seven hours of sleep every night so my personal goal when I when I went for that seminar was to get a glass of an extra glass of water every day one extra glass of water and what they taught us to do was basically you have a friend that you're accountable to on a daily basis so we actually had like we set up a group chat so you can actually do whichever way you want like it's either a group chat if you have more people or you know if you see the person on a daily basis at the gym it could just be a quick check-in like you know did you follow up on whatever you said you were going to do and the thing about what they shared with us at Thrive Global was that you need to be able to do that for a month before that habit becomes something that sticks like you know so when it was like drinking an extra glass of water like I know it's not much but for me I don't I sometimes forget to drink water and I don't drink enough and I know for that for a fact so that was something that it was for me it was a huge thing and I was gonna say you know every day I'm gonna drink one extra glass of water and in the morning when I wake up like when I get to the office I check in with my colleague so this was a colleague but also a friend so I do tell her like you know hey I had my glass of water it could just be a cute like a cute emoji like of a glass of water it doesn't have to be like hey I drank my glass of water you know and I think a lot of other people had their own versions it could be I like I mentioned that you know you want to go to the gym you want to eat one extra salad meal a week for those people who had their goals and they're more of like the social bit it could just be you know I'm gonna meet one new friend per day so I think in terms of structure like with regard to wellness and fitness it is possible and it's baby steps like that you know if you have a plan it is not so easy to stick to your plan if it's just kept between or just kept to yourself but if you have it accountable to someone else you know if you wake up in the morning and the person doesn't text you or you feel like you need to tell the person that yes you know I achieved my goal for the day yeah so so we're gonna open it up to the floor for questions now Fitbit have been ridiculously kind and are giving away two Fitbit verses tonight so that's one of those it's that's a version that you've got on right okay so oh it's the one that Nat's wearing as well and it's at the back as well so keeping in mind that we are opening it up to the floor for anyone with interesting questions or someone that makes an impact with John and Vicky specifically I'm just gonna put on Vicky will be in the running to win one of these two verses I just wanted to kind of jump back really quickly to what all of these guys are all of them all our panelists have been saying I I've actually worked with each of them at not them individually but with their brands at different points I've got a chronic condition and it's new neuro-based so that means that I'm on steroid therapy and that takes a lot of medication and your food habits change you get allergic to random things so I learned found out I'm allergic to gin which that was like three years ago I'm not an alcoholic I just want to clarify that I don't drink a lot but it's just that like you know you find out these like random things but I actually you fit were the ones who helped me to get back walking Fitbit was the one I when it comes to structure of you're looking for something to set that goal every day I cannot like I can't even explain to you what what a step the step watching does because I find that if I look at my watch at the end of the day and I've been like dropping in taxis or driving everywhere I will literally walk home from Southbridge Tower at City Hall just to hit those steps and by the time I get back someone's like nodding furiously over there you totally feel me right yeah and with I think with f45 and also with the community it's that come from the gyms that you go to you have the ability to meet people who are like-minded and I think that one of the biggest things and even when you're here tonight that you have to do is everyone here has their own backstory they've got their own goals they have their own questions and the only way you're going to find other people who have those same goals as you is if you have a conversation with them so if you go to the gym if you go in to you know any one of these gyms I'll get one of your Fitbit so I get on the Fitbit feed have a conversation with these people because you'd be surprised at who you would meet along the way who might have the same goals as you I just want to say I met Mira for the first time in in November and she is a truly remarkable individual and you know like Mira is a is a huge Fitbit fan and allowed me to share her story with my colleagues as part of a conference and you know incredible story incredible you know in amazing person one thing I wanted to talk about and you know you have to sort of stop yourself every now and then this is a workplace this is an office this is where people work you know the way that the world has changed in the last 10 15 20 years is quite remarkable and you know we talked about support before I think it would be a surprise if every person who's in this room tonight doesn't work for an employer who was really focused on your wellness so I work for Fitbit and I get flexible hours I get an allowance each month to go to the gym and a whole bunch of other stuff if it fits just you know launch this remarkable leave policy you know your employer is very focused on your wellness as well and that's not you know but that's a genuine focus because employers are you know really concerned about your work life balance as well you need to look into that so if you're working 10 12-hour days you know you need to think about that you need to talk to your you know your people at work about how to structure your life in a better way I just want to make that point because you know we're sitting here in this incredible room which is an office you know it's not like you know where I started working was rows of you know beige cubicles that's that's what an office used to be and employers that didn't really care about you know what you did or how you worked or how many hours you worked the world has changed in a really positive way and it's important to understand that hello I'm Sophie nice to meet you all and I'm an avid f45er and I'm also an avid Fitbit user and I just have some feedback to Fitbit it would be really wonderful if you could enable us to track f45 more accurately on Fitbit I will take that on board because John I've written into Fitbit I've had no response this is my opportunity to say to you please I will talk to you on your agenda I will make it make it a topic of discussion absolutely talk to Luciano after this no worries and we will look into it the device people in this room will hold you accountable does anyone else have a Fitbit how do you guys track it interval training session or workout I know 387 calories it says we track but I believe it's more so thank you very much for listening I think that's a good question I'm not sure it's just a piece of advice thank you very much thank you for that it wouldn't be you know a Fitbit employer employee if you would not permanent customer service wherever you went whenever you were any more questions yeah okay see where this goes but I just moved to a couple of weeks ago but I used to live here when I was younger so it's been incredible from what you've said how to watch actually how far the fitness industries come from being here 12 years ago to coming back here now I mean there was just none of this and I've been working in the UK for a women's only health and well-being club for the last three years and it's been really interesting seeing the fads and the trends as you talk about but some of the interesting things that because we had a whole medical clinic as part of the club as well and it was actually getting people like you said to actually get into fitness and actually shock people I guess in a way to actually say this is your health and it's not just through eating and exercise but through sleep deprivation people that are working longer hours nowadays women that are juggling things and that's why we created that space there but we used to well of our medical team used to have something called telomere testing and we also used to do something called DNA fit testing and the telomere testing which I'm sure you know about all of these things but it's a blood test that tells I guess ultimately your chronological age to your biological age and I did it and my and our CEO did it and mine actually came back younger which was shocking because I don't do that much exercise and I eat medially and hers came back I think she her body was five or six years older than her actual age which shocked her unbelievably into and for her it was she was getting five hours of sleep a night and she was stressed you know she built this business from scratch and the DNA fit test that was doing that was kind of what I think you were talking about Luciano and how everybody's different what you eat what you know fitness you do is different and it tells you kind of what fitness and nutrition you should eat for your body based on your DNA test I just be interested to know how that's kind of progressing here in Singapore over the last few years and what you kind of think of those kind of tests I guess because in the UK we will at our club that I was at before and that really did bring a lot of people into suddenly shocking them I guess into coming out she doing exercise and doing something about their health and balance overall yeah and new to genomics has been around for a long time so that's the DNA fit test they used to be very very expensive usually only sports people did it and basically in short healthy food is not healthy for everybody as in you know like a little story about me sweet potato makes me fart so but it's great for lots of you in this room right so but these tests will specify and that carbs are maybe better for you you should stay off the protein not so much but also it could flip on its head what you think is good nutrition in general and give you a specific as well as also you might think you're a great runner but actually you'd be better lifting weights and and all that sort of stuff so it doesn't need to define what you actually do but it's definitely put you in the right direction with the telomere tests about your your age it's that's a great one in the respect that I think people just think health is what you eat and how much you work out and it's way more multifaceted than that so it's what you eat it's how much you work out it's your stress levels it's how much you sleep and it's your hormone balance and a lot of people can do too but they don't very seldom get the five so sometimes that shock factor will make them reassess what's actually important so by that maybe getting up at 5 30 to go do your workout class whatever that might be maybe isn't beneficial to you maybe you need to actually have an extra hour's sleep and just get a good walk in at lunchtime that might actually be more beneficial for your health rather than then actually came at the gym every single day blood tests are super important particularly for ladies I mean for men as well but it gives us a lot of our hormone factors so thyroid for instance is a is a big one but also things like our iron levels one in three women are deficient in iron it's very very common sorry guys but because of our menses and and having kids and that really affects our ability to lose weight affects our ability to build muscle it affects our mental health hugely and it's just so just having certain criteria on paper can can make you more focused on where you should be putting your energy into because you might be focused in your energy into the into the wrong thing hi I'm Zelda so on sleep I'm just curious on what's exactly good sleep does napping help and does it contribute my dad's type 2 diabetes I see he's not working and I know how how chronicle it can be so sleep I see him sleeping half the day but he sleeps again at night so I want to know what exactly does it does naps amount to you as a bed sleep or good sleep I'll just dance a little bit and then I'll give and so napping shouldn't really be more than 20 minutes at a time so people say oh I had a great nap this afternoon it was two hours it's actually too long that can affect your your night sleep so the sleep that you have at night's actually better and although we're talking about sleep deprivation predominantly here too much sleep also can be too bad it can be bad for you as well so they don't really recommend for adults to have more than 11 hours consistently so around about that eight hour mark is pretty good and bit naps under 20 minutes or under it can be beneficial but anything longer than that will affect the quality of your sleep through the night so in short of your dad sleeping half the day then that's not really a great thing for your dad so with with sleep I guess you're the minimum that you're sort of looking to get at any night is at least seven and a half hours anything less than that and you're cheating yourself out of some aspect of your health so if you are going to skip sleep and on the topic of naps say for example you only managed to get six six hours of sleep sleep cycles typically run in 90 minute intervals so between rem and deep sleep and so if you can if you only say achieve four of those in a night she only sleep six hours if you can and this is probably not applicable to anyone here but if you can sleep for an hour and a half in the day it's better to have an hour and a half sleep than it's 20 minutes sleep because you're getting that fifth cycle so probably not that applicable though I can't sleep during the day if I have a nap and like it's almost impossible for me to go to sleep during the day you know I talked about the number of flights that I've had I cannot sleep on a plane I pass out I literally you know my head drops down so sleep during the day does not come easily to me so napping is is not a solution you know I think your father is definitely sleeping too much and I have you know he's obviously you know getting medical treatment you know it's it's the duration and it's the quality of sleep and we don't know that you go to sleep and you wake up in the morning if you're not tracking it and you really have no idea you know you might think I was asleep but you're actually awake or you're awake and you're asleep you know that that sensation I think being able to track it and you know the amount of data that a company like Fitbit has around sleep we now we now know what is a you know what is the desired amount and the reality is you know Asian people need less sleep than Caucasian people probably by maybe about 30 minutes you know and that that's born out of data that came out of a study that we did with Duke NUS here you know the thing is most people who have sleep apnea don't know unless they go and do a sleep apnea test so the benefit of tracking and measuring and understanding is is critical you know sleep tests are very expensive strapping on a wearable and and monitoring your sleep is actually very easy and and they're very accurate as well which which is a good outcome and you know as I said before sleep the quality of your sleep is becoming more and more critical to the management of chronic conditions you know as I said before we talk about type 2 diabetes most people think it you know it is wholly related to activity and diet but sleep forms a huge part of of your ability to you know to defeat a condition like type 2 diabetes totally randomly just before we go on to the questions my dad had the same thing where he was just sleeping a lot and I promise I am not plugging Fitbit but I actually got him the fit like the are like the aria I think it was called back then just so to track his steps because if I called him in the afternoon and said to him hey what are you doing he'll tell me that he's like been busy reading the newspaper and talking to his friends he's not he's sleeping and so what I used to do is that I would check at the the following morning how many steps did he do and if he didn't do enough steps I'll go with him on Saturday and we'll go for a walk around the block like five times to like force him to do something that's amazing it's okay you got it literally Asian Asian dads man just got to get in there and like just roll with it all right there was okay we will come back to you but that person in the back if you wanted to did you want to just speak up from there's that okay so I'm just data guy tonight I can I can rattle off you know stats about anything it's a look it's a really a fantastic question you know I have a Fitbit and I still there are nights when I sleep very badly and you know my mind's racing I can't sleep you know I will take melatonin which makes me pass out we did a study in the US you know last year Fitbit launched a mood logging app for the two smartwatches the Versa and Ionic and what what we found and and there are there's been a number of studies but this is one of the most significant studies that's been done Fitbit's published a white paper and and what we've determined is there is a direct correlation between activity and mood so this is self-logging you know it was not giving people a question and a fill out it was basically are you sad okay or happy and and what we did was a direct correlation between how people were logging their moods and how much activity they were doing and people who are happy were doing more steps so you know it's a it's a fairly simple equation and it's not necessarily steps it could be a workout it could be you know a whole bunch of you know swimming if that works for you you know again it's it sounds like an easy solution but you know life is difficult and life is getting harder and harder you know the you know the advent of social media the advent of you know devices has has really changed the way that we live our lives and you know it it is very difficult it's hard to kind of put it down and walk away from it but but I think you know mental well-being is far more important than we all think you know I think the ability to relax an active mind is critical and I've learned that you know and I've got access to a whole bunch of data you know I've got you know I'm pretty much manage everything but if I'm not sleeping I know it's because I haven't turned my mind off and you know despite me you know lecturing before about devices my phone sits there and if I can't sleep the first thing I do is pick it up and I'll pick it up and I know it's like having KFC I know it's bad I shouldn't do it but I can't help myself and I sit there and go on Twitter you know it's not a good solution but you know the ability to calm your mind and to manage your activity there is a you know there's a direct correlation I'm gonna take this from a slightly different perspective and you can't escape stress right it's it's going to follow around wherever you go so it's how you deal with that and and and how you mitigate around your life with stress so there's a few things that I find with myself and my clients that help our second brain is our gut so if you eat healthy your brain will feel healthier we've been talking a lot about type 2 diabetes today but they're actually recategorizing diabetes and they're going to be three categories now and the third one is Alzheimer's and dementia and it stems from the same way that type 2 diabetes is created so therefore if your diet is is not on point it's not just affecting your physical as in your body but it's also affecting your mental so stripping back your nutrition and looking at what you're doing there so coping mechanisms have a glass of wine every night you know like I say damp Jan here I'm not against wine I had one before I came up here but if you're using it constantly is a coping mechanism it is going to create more problems there's lots of studies that show sleep helps with stress but then you know it's that ever decreasing circles if you're stressed you're not gonna sleep blah blah blah if you can't sleep you get more stressed so trying to really get that sleep hygiene into place so that you're sleeping becomes more productive getting out into the sun between the first two hours of sunshine in the morning so luckily if you live in Singapore it's between seven and nine if you live in Scotland you have to get up at like three in the morning in the summer and get out there or just come home from the nightclub at three and you kind of solve the problem but that first two hours of sun is critical for sparking things in our brain that I don't understand I'm not going to pretend to because I'm not a psychologist but it really does work not just with our mental health but with our sleeping we've got a hormone in our body called adenosine which sort of like it's like a timer so when we wake up in the morning it starts to accumulate and things like stress affects it things like drinking alcohol affects it so it needs to reach a certain point that our serotonin and then our melatonin works to to put us to sleep one of the things that gets that ticking is the sunlight getting out and feeling nature so lots of studies show that just taking off your shoes what's the name of that film the guy it's Richard Geer oh pretty woman and they have yeah she hasn't walking around with these feet it's true though right I mean I know it's like a corny film but getting out and actually being amongst nature helps with stress so just a few actual just natural things really does help I guess tying it back to exercise so you listed about 10 different things that make you stressed so in the present day we live in a state of perpetual stress we got deadlines relax our relationships you know all these concerns financial and otherwise stress actually originated from a biological perspective of that thing's gonna eat me or I need to eat that so like the flow of events was that would happen and what your body would do is your digestive system would shut down it's the most important part of your overall health so when that shuts down it basically only allows for the energy to flow to your brain your lungs in your heart so you can either catch or get away so by following that that feeling with exercise it's kind of what your body was used to all those thousands years ago or for thousands of years before we sort of evolved into our modern day us so exercise is actually really well as a really good way of managing stress if you quite often when I feel like crap or something bad happens or something I particularly that unsettles me I will go run up and down a set of stairs for 20 minutes and after you've done that for 20 minutes you kind of think everything else isn't so bad and you can sort of see a way around it so yeah just using exercise for stress so I can share from personal experience I have a lot of trouble sleeping and my fiancee who's at the back of the room often hears this from me because I will lie in bed I'm like I can't sleep I could be lying in bed for half an hour an hour and then something that Wendy pointed out was really resonated with me because you know if you're lying in bed and you know you have to be up in the morning at 5 30 or 6 or 7 to go to the gym or to the office strangely but you get more stress because you can't get to sleep and then it's a vicious cycle because it's like I'm stressed I can't get to sleep but at the same time I know I have to get to sleep and I have taken melatonin pills I have tried so it's a melatonin is something that your body produces naturally which helps you fall asleep but what they have in the market is they have melatonin and pills that can I can simulate you know what your body produces naturally and then that's opposed to help you go to bed I've also tried like you know having essential oils in my room I have tried turning off dimming the lights before I had to bed and I think it's just some of these little things that you can do creating a routine for yourself and creating an environment that is a little bit more conducive for you to fall asleep it's very hard to escape from like work stresses so for myself I do know that sometimes you know you have a giant presentation that you have to do to your boss or you're thinking about the that 5 p.m. meeting that you have tomorrow or you know you have to meet a client the following day like it's it's never ending and it could be work or it could be even just family commitments etc and it just adds up and it's not very healthy when it when you're trying to get to bed and rest is very very important so I'm still learning I'm still trying I'm still trying to figure out like you know what works best for me and I think maybe I guess that my piece of advice would just be to figure out what works for you like you know it could be a warm glass of milk like you know just something familiar some people you know when you grow up like your mom or your dad would pour you a glass of milk if that's familiar and that helps you fall asleep or maybe it's a warm shower maybe it's getting I don't know like for ladies maybe a face mask I try and avoid screen time I know it's so it's strange because like sometimes before I go to bed I do want to de-stress and I find that the best mode of de-stressing is literally just scrolling on Facebook or Instagram and it's it's strange because or Netflix yeah that's my weakness so I lie in bed watching Brooklyn 9 9 I'm watching the taste and if you're watching a food show trust me it's very it's very tough to fall asleep yeah so I think I have tried to cut that out I minimize screen time I make sure that you know an hour before bed I try and get into a routine that helps me sleep better yeah okay more questions well right so I think that was here first yeah okay so we haven't talked about travel I think a lot of people here have jobs where we need to travel we have regional roles sometimes global roles where we have lots of calls in the evening and so how do we manage sleep health exercise when we need to travel I guess that's my question so I travel a lot as well and the thing for me is you know usually when I get to the hotel I go to the gym it doesn't matter what time it is I will go into a workout and then I have room service and then I go to bed and and I sleep well you know that's my way of coping the other thing I do and I'm you know trying not to be a walking billboard for Fitbot Fitbit but I actually walk a lot you know if I'm somewhere if I if I get there even at you know sort of one o'clock in the morning if it's a safe city like Tokyo I'll go for a walk if it's Manila I might not but you know walking and and exercising you know is what keeps me sane when when I'm traveling can we take and biggest hit when it comes to food when you're traveling is to be realistic with yourself you generally if you're you've got a global role in your traveling around a lot you'll probably stay at the same hotels predominantly breakfast is usually the easiest one to to have control over and oftentimes hotels will make your lunch to take with you to work if you're going to be stuck in the office and you don't have your usual telecare sun and moon around to get your your salad or whatever it is so don't be scared to ask the hotel to prep for you because if you're a regular customer they'll happily do that for you as well and as much as possible of your your client meetings etc. restaurants try and have control of the place that you're going to meet and try and have a look on the internet before you go at the menu and make your choices of what you're going to eat before you get there so that you're not swayed by what other people are doing again it all comes down to small wins and not being too harsh on yourself because you can only control so many things in your circumstances. Hi there my name is Laura so we've spoken about sleep we've spoken about exercise we've spoken about food it was a fantastic question about our spiritual health but one thing we haven't spoken about is supplements and I'm in the food ingredients business and we've recently just acquired a company a probiotic company I travel quite a lot probably every two weeks and I try to maintain everything but the marketing that's coming at me about the supplement business is obviously very loud it's actually forecast to be worth 280 billion by 2024 growing faster than the fitness industry. I've grown up taking multivitamins all my life my mom has given me farmaton and hold loads of other things as well I'd love to just know what your opinion is on this particular industry and how you advise your clients. What time does this finish again? I'm not a massive lover of supplements because most people don't know what they're doing with them most of them are not necessary I believe it was 490 million dollars worth of supplements bought in Singapore last year and probably 450 million of those were just peed down the toilet because they were completely useless with multivitamins you're not really getting the quality or the quantity of each vitamin that you actually need for it to be beneficial also the way that nature has devised these things is very clever for instance calcium is never just absorbed by its own it always needs vitamin D and vitamin K alongside it so if you're just taking a calcium supplement you're probably going to get kidney stones number one but number two it's not going to be absorbed because the other things you need there are not present so you're just going to pee it out when you drink milk it has vitamin K and the milk is not the best source of calcium either but just using as an example it already has the the other things that it needs there as well the low-fat guidelines that we've been had for the last 40 years predominantly people are not eating enough fat in their diet so you've got your fat soluble vitamins that are not going to be absorbed regardless to how much you eat because you don't have the fat present when it comes to protein you don't need anywhere need as much as you think you do unless you're going to be like a massive bodybuilder in which case you might struggle it's about 1.2 grams of protein per kilo of body weight woman very seldom bulk up without doing a lot of other stuff so you could be taking your protein shakes left right and center and you probably pee in 90% of it out as good as a meal supplement or to use to cook with we've got loads of recipes that my great recipe designer Michelle over there so little Michelle and uses them proteins instead of like safe for instance wheat etc so they could they can be good in that respect as well with things like iron there has to be lots of other things available at the same time for it to be absorbed a lot of women don't have enough iron in their system because they just don't absorb it properly so what's the point of taking a tablet instead of eating it in your food you're not going to absorb it regardless so you might need to have another intervention such as an infusion or something for instance as well lots of stuff that we eat and drink will block our nutrient am I going on too long here yeah it's okay well block our nutrient absorption so black tea for instance will block absorption of iron so although technically speaking when you look at vegetarian iron you're getting enough from things like spinach etc it's not actually the bio available iron that our body likes unfortunately I'm sorry vegetarians that does come predominantly from animal products as in meat and if you're eating iron predominantly from vegetarian products black tea will block any iron that you get from that vegetarian source so it's completely useless so that's why you have in places like India etc such high levels of iron deficiency and this has got nothing to do with the question that you asked but I just find it really interesting I found the site not long ago myself one of the main causes of maternal death through delivering a baby is iron deficiency and in this day and age and the solution is so simple is quite important to me I find that I was almost in tears and I find that I've got four kids myself and to think that people are actually dying in huts in Africa when it's a super simple solution to help those those women it's not that expensive and it's not that difficult and so I think supplements have their place if prescribed properly if used correctly if you understand why you need them if you've got all the other factors involved but from what I see they're not being used in the correct manner yes yeah I'm a big believer in probiotics but you do need to cycle them you don't need to take them all the time and your body gets used to them so you've had if you've been really run down you're really tired you've been sick you've had antibiotics etc take probiotics they'll definitely help again your most bioavailable probiotics are found in your natural foods so kimchi, sauerkraut blah blah blah fermented food in short magnesium is another one the way our farming is done now so when I was a kid I lived in a little city in Scotland called Aberdeen there was a farm at the end of my street they used to rotate the fields with different crops they don't do that now they just put one crop in and the soil doesn't produce so the minerals that used to do so magnesium deficiency is super common and zinc and that's about it really you don't need anything else as much as you want to go through more questions we're actually running way out of time so if you do have more questions for our panelists they're going to stick around hopefully for a little while more to answer any questions that you might have and John will let us know about whom he thinks would be a great fit because I like to put on other people so in addition to some of the to the folks that we have here you would have seen on our event page we've been having a couple of promotions popping up we told our you know some of our favorite gyms and community places that we go to where the fact that we were having this event and they put up put up some promos for us so I know that some people had talked about wanting to get into boxing why is fantastic but boom which is on Cecil Street is giving you $10 off your trial pass we bar is at the back over there so I'm we're gonna just before we wrap up we'll ask her to just do a quick intro and they have a booth over there so if you'd like to just sign up I think it's a free trial for today one one free class for today and Vicki lives by it she's obsessed with it she won't stop talking about it ballet body so you've got Lisa at the back she's one of the founders of ballet body so I got I person got kicked out of ballet class because I'll never mind so ballet body is another group that you can talk to and they've got a promotion on as well at the moment and so you can talk to them at 45 Luciano's team who runs Amoy Street Sigla River Valley Chombaru are doing a two-week free pass which you generally have to pay for each week so go on to the link it's on our event page you'll be able to sign up there and Fitbit is you've got some devices around the back as well so 20% off Fitbit devices or you might be the two lucky people that win one because you had you sounded really interesting to the Fitbit folks but um yeah so that's it just to quickly just wrap up that's Virginia she is our who's your mama program director and who's your mama is a mentorship program for anyone who's looking for any guidance when it comes to work career in terms of in even if I think one of the ones that we had last year was a girl in ballet papa who was a graphic designer but her parents and approve of her being a graphic designer so we actually tried to get her a job in Jakarta and we're moving her across to see so that she'll be able to you know get something that's more in line with what she loves so we are looking for mentors we're looking for mentees apparently someone's already signed up as a mentee so thank you so much but you can hit up our web our site for more details as well and then Vicki is just quickly going to talk about IWD yes you know International Woman Day is coming up in March and we'll be doing our first ever she says festival where we have a very exciting partners but this year the tagline is balance for better so how can we actually achieve balance and create a better world and essentially what we're gonna be doing is having like workshops and talks around it finding out how we can achieve let's say work-life balance to even equal work opportunities and also closing that gender pay gap how can we actually achieve equal pay to so we actually have a kind of cute little social media campaign that will be launching very soon which is around the woman that actually inspire you and you can hear a lot more about this especially since you signed up for today so if you've came in without signing up with our welcome committee definitely drop us a note or drop us your name card so that we can let you know about this event that will be coming up in March so we're really really excited about this and hope to see you there so before we end I just want to share a bit about my personal journey with finding the right balance also so Mira has been a big advocate of health and fitness and especially just now you share it with you know the health stuff that you've gone through right but I think essentially finding your own balance is to find happiness which is what I got out of you know the talk today I'm not the most fit person I still like my vices the unfortunately but you know it's really about finding that right balance for you finding that structure and you know I'm finding out the community and the friendship that you can find to actually help you achieve that and I felt like actually since last year I really got into that structure and part of that was also because I found a workout that actually worked for me it's not work waking up at 5 30 am but you know it's I realized actually I kind of like belly yoga pilates which is actually bar yeah so we could get Joey to come on stage to just talk a bit about we bar because she's got a little booth over there yeah hi my name is Joey and I'm from we but hi Lisa hi hi guys oh my god so many people and this is more people that I'm used to a bar class we usually have about 8 to 15 and wow all right anyway I'm from we bar we bar is lead Asia's leading boutique bar studio we are specialized in everything bar so high impact bar low impact bar stretch and technique floor bar we have it all prenatal bars for postnatal we can bring your babies along babies at the bar all right anyway we have four studios here in Singapore and one in Hong Kong we we saw about three years ago we our workout combines ballet technique pilates and strength training we have two kinds of we have several class types the more popular ones is our signature multi-level which is cardio based and our fundamentals which is alignment for the total body burn but more than a workout we really provide a community and we try to empower each other to be your strongest and happier self oh yeah right right now we are having a birthday promotion so it's 15% off all our class packs yeah and also if you want to RSVP for our free class happening on the 11th of February after Chinese New Year all right you can come down to the booth and sign up for it thank you and just just before we finish up we're gonna give away four Fitbits tonight and the reason I'm gonna do it your question about mindfulness was brilliant so if you want to go down my colleagues WTM may be down there they will give you a Fitbit Versa the lady who was brave enough to ask me customer service question I think deserves a Fitbit so you may go down and pick a device and your your friend I'd like you to take one for your father you know I think you know to help you understand what's going on with him because clearly you know that's an issue and you thought about asking me the question and then I'm gonna ask my panel fellow panelists to decide who the fourth one should be I think there's some good questions down here any ideas who else asked a question hands up okay yeah all right down the back thank you very much so thank you John so just to kind of wrap it up now I know that we're running way over time but in February we're going to be having a follow-up to tonight's session with our venue partner Monte Carlo boys we will hopefully have some of the folks from this panel they are there but we'll also have Karen nyo who's a fitness blogger as well as she runs at 45 challenge will be speaking in addition to that and a couple of other folks so if you'd like to have more conversations with them and you can't sit around tonight February 20th at 6 p.m. is the day and we'll have it up and running and tickets will run out I know that this one ran out in two days and some people got tickets later on but hopefully we'll see you on February 20th and other than that we'll see you at our next session and thanks for sticking around we hope you found it as fun as we did and thank you to our panelists