 All right guys welcome back. I'm excited to introduce the next speaker. His name is Simon Chakras and he is the co-author of The One Diet. He's also a high-intensity personal trainer, a weight loss coach and a well-being expert and I had the pleasure of chatting with him a few minutes ago and can't wait to hear more about his speech so please help me welcome Simon. Thank you Robbie. Welcome back to this afternoon's session. I'm going to be talking to you today about having a balanced life. It's going to be about stress, nutrition and exercise component as well. We're going to look to get all of those in. If you have any questions and I know the Q&A at the end is quite short today, you can get me on Twitter, put the hashtag T21C and I'll do my best over the next few days to answer any questions you have. So a little bit more about me. As Robbie just said, I'm a personal trainer focusing on the hit approach, high-intensity training, working with people typically 20 minutes once or twice a week. I'm a nutrition consultant and out of that has come the writing of The One Diet which is a evolutionarily based approach to nutrition. I assume some of you in the audience are aware of that approach to nutrition at the moment and I'm a well-being evangelist. As you can see I take my role as that pretty seriously. So why am I here today? What we're going to cover is stress and its effects on the mind and body and nutrition, the benefits of eating well and then the exercise component fitness and recreation and how to build those into your life. So the overarching approach is how to have a balanced life where you can perform at your best in everything you do in your life. The outcomes I'd like to achieve today is showing you how to improve your ability to cope with stressful situations, how to manage and improve your energy levels and that's through psychological approaches it's through nutritional approaches and it's through a sensible approach to exercise. How to keep yourself strong and healthy in general and a greater understanding of how to care for yourself as individuals. In our working lives in fact in all our lives in our approach to dating I know this conference is focused on dating as well. We need to be fit for purpose and that means our knowledge and our skill set, the skills that we have to use to get our needs met in this life are really important and what's equally as important is if we want to perform optimally using those skills is we need to be fit for purpose in terms of our physical and mental well-being. So it's only when we can perform our best when we're in the zone and we have that state of flow that we can actually get the most out of those skill sets we've built up over time. Does anybody here have a problem with selfishness? I know you're on Brooke's spoke this morning. This is all about being selfish looking after yourself even if you were to say oh you know I really enjoy helping other people which is a great thing to do and I'd say give as much of yourself away as you can but first and foremost look after yourself, be selfish, take care of number one first and then you'll be able to take care of business, you'll be able to take care of everybody else around you. Is everybody clear with what we're going to talk about today? Are there any questions so far or suggestions as to any of those areas you'd like me to particularly focus on? If not I'll carry straight on with the first section which is stress. There are three main causes of stress and distress in our lives and the first one is change. When we have a situation which is causing us to become aware of circumstances that we're not used to that can create a stress response in us. If somebody's not used to approaching women that situation can be stressful if you lose your job that situation can be stressful and what I would say is have an open mind towards change because change is inevitable in all our lives it's going to happen and the more open and receptive you are to change the more free-flowing and able you'll be able to cope with anything that life throws your way. So for instance if you were to lose your job some people could look at that in a very negative way and get upset about it and get into a state of depression whereas what I would encourage you to do is look at that as an opportunity it's an advantage for you. You've now been given a whole lot of freedom to take your lives in the direction you want them to go in. A second cause of stress typically is increased demands. When we have greater demands put on us and in the workplace that might be your it's coming up Friday afternoon and you're suddenly told you've got to get this project finished tonight client needs it by the end of working day today suddenly the demands on you have dramatically increased and if you're in a state where you've been looking after yourself building up to that you will be able to perform optimally still even under those circumstances. However somebody who's not good at managing their stress or looking after themselves is going to feel that and they will run themselves unfortunately into the ground over time and the third major cause of stress is decreased resources. Again if we look at the workplace a friend of mine recently is working for a company and he lost his PA suddenly he's expected to do all the work that his PA was doing for him in addition to the most important parts of his role now that's adding a lot of stress to him and luckily I was able to show him some techniques that enabled him to get through that as everybody aware that there is both positive and negative stress anybody have you heard of both of those excellent well if we look at stress as a curve stress can be like a really positive thing because when we're put under pressure we start to perform optimally up to this state of you stress which means performing at your best if we have nothing going on in our lives we're going to be down here we're going to be bored we're going to be tired when we move up taking appropriate goals on board we're going to have excitement we're going to have fun and we're going to have pleasure in our lives however if we remain in that state for too long