Special Features - January 2017 Wave

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PEOPLE | COMMUNITY | CULTURE

JANUARY 2017

The Wave is Campbell River’s leading lifestyle magazine.

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[2] WAVE MAGAZINE | JANUARY 2017

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contents JANUARY 2017 | ISSUE #19

5 MAKING YOUR RESOLUTIONS STICK Tips to stay strong this year

8 THE BOTTOM LINE IS...

Resolutions – money can be a great motivator

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TOMORROW IS A GIFT YOU DON’T KNOW YOU’RE GOING TO GET

Local woman wants everyone to appreciate life a bit more every day

YOU CAN DO IT

Port Hardy radio personality shows self-betterment doesn’t need to start in January

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Making your resolutions stick A new year often begins with good intentions as thousands resolve to make positive changes in their lives.

Resolutions are easy to make when one is toasting at midnight on Dec. 31 and ready to take on the world.

But they can be much harder to keep as the days turn into weeks and weeks turn into months.

Almost one-third of Canadians make a New Year’s resolution, and three quarters of those people eventually break them.

If you didn’t make a resolution at the end of December, there’s still time. You can change anytime you want, after all, iIt’s your life.

For those who want to push through the fail point this year – and stay strong in the face of tempting desserts and the craving to light up a cigarette – some of these suggestions may help resolutions stick.

Start small Don’t make an unrealistic resolution.

Losing weight is a popular resolution and some resolve to drop dozens of pounds in an effort to completely transform their bodies. However, when the weight doesn’t magically come off, it can be easy to grow discouraged. Weight loss is not instantaneous, and healthy weight-loss plans advocate gradual weight loss, such as one or two pounds per week. It can take several months to see a

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considerable difference if you’re aiming to lose 50 pounds. Instead of setting such a lofty weight-loss goal, establish incremental milestones with tangible dates.

Set a reasonable time frame Those making a resolution should take care to be realistic when determining how long it will take to achieve your goal. Achieving a difficult goal can take time, so don’t expect overnight success.

Get support or talk it out Speaking about what you are going through and getting reassurance from other people can work wonders to strengthen resilience. When the desire to quit sneaks up, you can consult with a friend or consider a support group. Taking a group class at the gym may be a more effective motivational tool than working out solo.

Achieving a difficult goal can take time, so don’t expect overnight success.

Keep resolutions private, if that’s what feels right It could be better to keep your resolution to yourself, in some cases.

Many people are compelled to share their resolutions with friends and family. However, that can lead to feelings of competition or animosity if someone is realizing goals before you. Feel free to keep your resolution private as you go through the process. Once you have met your goal, then you can share your success with others.

Create an incentive program Set up an accountability system. Institute a rewards system for your success. You might even use a monetary system as a double-bonus.

When you stick to a resolution over a predetermined period, put a dollar in a jar. If you fall off course, take a dollar away. Find the incentive that works for you.

Avoid expensive resolutions Before making a resolution, research how much a resolution might cost.

Gym memberships or new hobbies may stretch your budget, and if you cannot afford a resolution, how can you keep it? If money is a concern, choose resolutions that are fiscally possible. Failing to keep a resolution can be all the more depressing when you’re thinking, “I could have done that … if I was something I could’ve afforded.”

Avoid boring resolutions Many people make boring resolutions that often focus on the mundane instead of more positive things. Resolutions need not be changes that profoundly alter your mental or physical well-being. Making fun resolutions will probably help you stick to them. Perhaps you will resolve to spend more time with the kids or promise to try more adventurous activities. Maybe you decide it’s time pursue a hidden passion, such as music or art. Enjoyable resolutions are much easier to keep.

Whatever you decide (or decided) to resolve yourself to, here’s to a happy and healthy 2017.

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The bottom line is …

Making New Year’s resolutions is a tradition for many.

How successful a resolution is depends on the person making the commitment.

Now, more than ever, money can be a great motivator when it comes to resolutions.

So here are a few resolutions that may not be entirely about money, but can still save you big dollars in the long run.

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Learn about finance

Quit Smoking In addition to the medical benefits of quitting smoking, saying “so long” to cigarettes can also save people a substantial amount of money. The average cost of a pack of cigarettes is somewhere in the $10 to $12 range, so smokers who quit will no longer be spending that money, but quitting may also lower their health or life insurance premiums, as well.

If you have little knowledge of finance and investing, then you are likely paying someone to handle your finances or maybe even storing your money beneath the mattress. Learning about finance, whether you learn on your own or take courses, can help you gain greater control of your finances, greatly reducing, if not eliminating, the amount of money you’re spending for someone else to look after your money.

In addition, learning about finance can help you grow your money rather than having it collect dust under the mattress if you’re not currently paying someone to make your money grow.

Eliminate your debt

Pay more than the minimum on your loans It might sound odd to pay more than you’re required each month in an effort to save money, but paying more than the minimum on loans, including student loans, mortgages and car loans, reduces the amount of interest you’re paying in the long run, shortening the length of the loan in the process. Paying as little as $20 extra per month can significantly reduce the amount of interest you will pay over the life of a loan.

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Some resolutions are more popular than others, and eliminating debt is one of the more popular New Year’s resolutions. But some people don’t realize just how to eliminate debt. While it’s important to save money, highinterest debt should be eliminated as quickly as possible. For example, if you pay off a credit card that charges you 20 per cent on your account balance with money you might have deposited into a savings account that earns just 1 per cent interest, then you will have, in essence, gotten a 19 percent return on your investment. It’s important to save money, but don’t do so at the expense of ignoring existing high-interest debt.

New Year’s resolutions are not always easy to keep, but those that can positively affect your bottom line may be easier to live up to.

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[10] WAVE MAGAZINE | JANUARY 2017

Tomorrow is a gift you don’t know you’re going to get STORY BY MIKE DAVIES

This year, at least one local woman will say ‘I love you’ as often as she can Only two-and-a-half short years ago, a then-34-year-old Kimberly Bennett was working away at her burgeoning career in auto insurance sales, living the typical life of a born-and-bred mid-Islander. She and her three-year-old daughter were a happy pair of ladies just making their way through the world as best they could. But on Mother’s Day of 2014, everything changed.

“I woke up at about 3 a.m. and I couldn’t see out of my right eye,” Bennett says.

“I got out of bed, and thought, ‘did I just have a stroke?’” She decided that, no, she probably didn’t just have a stroke. She probably just slept wrong and some pressure was placed on a weird spot on her face or something. So she went back to bed.

But when she mentioned to it to her mom the next day, when she and her daughter went over for a nice Mother’s Day breakfast, she – as moms will do – made her go get checked out.

She went to the doctor, and was relieved, at first, to find out she was right about not having a stroke. And her optometrist said nothing was wrong with her eyes. And the ophthalmologist she saw said the same thing.

“But then the ophthalmologist started asking me these questions about whether I had any numbness or tingling in my hands and feet, which was something I’d been complaining about to my doctors for years, but they had always chalked it up to poor circulation or a pinched nerve – something normal,” Bennett says.

Once the ophthalmologist had her answers to those questions, she decided Bennett should probably have an MRI. “We had to rule out multiple sclerosis,” Bennett says. “We didn’t talk about what else it could be.”

But it wasn’t multiple sclerosis.

On Sept. 4, 2014, she found out what it was. The phone rang, and instead of

JANUARY 2017 | WAVE MAGAZINE [11]

being told over the phone, she was asked to come to her doctor’s office.

“I’ll never forget when he walked in the room. I could just tell by the look on his face that something was very wrong,” Bennett says.

She had planned for her mom to be at her side when she took the call, but when the phone rang, she answered it rather than letting it go to voicemail and calling back after her mom got there.

So she was by herself.

She tried to be casual, asking him as light-heartedly as she could muster, “So, what’s up, doc?”

“I’m really sorry to tell you that you have a Stage III brain tumour,” the voice on the other end of the line said.

“But he just looked at me for a minute not saying anything. Then he just said ‘I’m sorry.’”

“That’s one stage below the worst it can get,” Bennett says. “Stage IV is, like, there’s no coming back.”

Sorry for what? Bennett asked.

So she asked about treatment options.

Since there is no easy way to tell someone they have a brain tumour, he just said it.

She’d have to head back over to Vancouver for seven weeks of radiation, five days a week, “and chemo every day,” she says. “It was pretty intense.”

And then it was real. And that was the start of what her new life would become.

Her life, for quite some time, became a series of tests and appointments with various specialists… and then more tests.

And nothing was changing, “so they gave me the option to watch and wait or have a biopsy done, but surgery wasn’t an option because of the location of the tumour,” she says. “There was a greater risk than there was a reward, so to speak.”

Based on the size and density of the tumour, Bennett says, “they figured I’d had it a long time, but it was a slowgrowing, non-aggressive form of brain cancer. But as a single mom, I couldn’t just watch and wait. I needed to know what I was up against.”

So she went across to Vancouver General Hospital for a biopsy. She was in there for three days after the biopsy was done. They can’t release you until they know you can balance and take care of yourself well enough not to stumble off a sidewalk into traffic, after all.

Her mother brought her daughter over once early in her treatment, but that was the only time.

“It was so hard on everyone,” Bennett says. “Saying goodbye again…” she pauses to collect herself. “She didn’t understand. She was only four. That’s really, really hard for a little person to understand, and for myself to have to watch her leave, knowing I was staying … it was tough. So I asked my mom and dad not to bering her back until I could come back with them and start my new life.”

And when she got back to Campbell River, she found out exactly what that new life would entail.

It was a life of five days of chemotherapy pills, followed by blood work to figure out what her next dose should be when it started 23 days later.

And they came home to wait for the results.

“I was so sick. I was puking and … just so tried,” Bennett says. “For six months it was all I could do to get up the stairs to the bathroom. I couldn’t eat because I had no appetite. I was about 130 lbs when I started treatment and at one point I was down to about 107.”

These she got over the phone. She could have gone back over to find out in person what was going on, “but I didn’t want to make that trip again if I didn’t have to,” she says.

But now, a year out from that constant treatment – she still has to go in for periodic brain scans to see what’s happening in there and take some medication to keep

[12] WAVE MAGAZINE | JANUARY 2017

Kimberly Bennett (right) and her sister, Jenn, on a sister trip to Cancun in April of last year, ticking another item off Kim’s “Bucket List.”

side-effects of the disease under control – she’s back up to a normal weight, she’s got enough energy to keep up to her daughter most days, and she’s got a totally new outlook on life.

were to train me to do something, it’s possible it just wouldn’t stick.”

She also has some new dexterity issues.

The taste of food.

“I can’t even French braid my daughter’s hair anymore. I have to really concentrate on things that I used to be able to just do with my eyes closed – normal, everyday things like doing up the button on my pants. Tying shoes…” she trails off.

Going for a walk beside the ocean.

But she does what she can to stay busy.

Even just waking up in the morning.

“At 34-years-old, to be told you’ll never go back to work… it’s tough. But, you know what? I get to spend that much more time with my daughter, and not knowing how much time I have left, it makes those hours – those minutes – so much more special.”

“It makes you appreciate the little things and the things that maybe you took for granted and never thought were important,” she says.

“Unfortunately my memory sucks now,” she says with another light-hearted chuckle. She laughs pretty easily for someone who is talking about the negative effects of brain cancer. “I can remember the stupidest things from my childhood that have absolutely no meaning or relevance, but I can have a conversation with my boyfriend in the morning and forget having it by the time he gets home from work. My daughter says I have ‘remembery problems,’ which I totally do,” she says with another laugh.

The bad news is that probably won’t ever change. The good news, however, is also that it could never change.

“I’m fortunate that, because of the kind of cancer it is, it won’t metastasize outside my brain,” she says, but she’ll have it forever and she’ll have to keep checking in on it for the rest of her life.

She goes for another scan every 12 weeks, and puts the image up on her fridge beside the first one from 2014 as a reminder that she’s still kicking this thing.

“I need that tangible proof,” she says. “It helps me stay positive.”

She gets a little stir crazy, she says, because she’s not able to pursue any sort of “competitive employment,” meaning she’ll never be able to go back to her old job – or hold any job for that matter. Probably ever.

“I’m a liability,” she admits. “My short-term memory is so bad that I just can’t reliably keep things in there. If you

And so she volunteers as much as she can for her daughter’s school activities.

And she fundraises for cancer research.

Most importantly, though, she spends a lot of her time telling people she loves them.

“I don’t walk away from anybody I love without telling them that,” she says, choking up a bit – not for the first time during our discussion. “Because you just don’t know…today is a present and tomorrow is a gift you don’t know you’re going to get, so you have to tell those people you love them.”

And she wishes everyone would do that more.

“It shouldn’t take getting brain cancer for people do that,” she says, back to laughing again, somehow. “I wish people wouldn’t take life for granted. Love every second you’re awake, and just tell people you love them. Whether you say it once a day or 20 times a day, just tell them.

“And wake up every day, appreciating that. Appreciate that you woke up again.”

That’s what she’s going to do, at least.

And she’ll do it with a smile, and a laugh … and an “I love you.”

JANUARY 2017 | WAVE MAGAZINE [13]

Most people wait until Jan. 1 to make New Year’s resolutions. However, Port Hardy’s Sandra (Sam) Boyd got a head start.

Boyd recently completed a three-month weight loss challenge under the personal coaching of First Choice Fitness Port Hardy owner Tara McCart, and as part of the 1240 Coast AM radio team, has been very open to the public about her efforts and the challenges she has faced.

On Nov. 1, the second official weigh-in of the threemonth challenge, Boyd had her first weigh-in which demonstrated clearly that her hard work and dedication was paying off - she had lost 2.5 pounds and a remarkable seven inches off her body.

But this is just the latest phase of Boyd’s transformative journey. Boyd’s efforts to lead a healthier life started in 2015 when she managed to lose an incredible 50 pounds. Then everything stalled.

“I had hit a wall with my weight loss and was struggling with my health,” she says. “I was also challenged with finding the motivation to do it, so I decided to approach Tara with a proposal and see if she would take me on and we would go public through the radio and she gets the advertising, and I get the training and help that I need.”

Boyd committed to working with McCart between 45 minutes and an hour, five days a week with a program that includes weight training and cardio – a routine which is constantly changed to keep Boyd’s body guessing and adapting for maximum results.

Boyd is also required to do physical things on the weekend, including things like bike riding, walking, yoga and stretching exercises.

‘You can do it’ STORY BY KATHY O’REILLY-TAYLOR

Port Hardy radio personality shows self-betterment doesn’t need to start in January

However, the 90-Day Challenge is not just about exercise. An integral component is a meal plan that includes portion control and a well-rounded diet, not sacrificing specific foods, although potato chips and pop are not on the diet.

“It’s about eating clean, and eating well,” McCart says, adding that the ultimate goal is to create a lifestyle change that is manageable moving forward, instead of one that is so extreme people may fall back into old bad habits. It’s not an easy thing to do.

The portion control, especially, ”makes me eat more often throughout the day, which is something else I have struggled with,” she says.

But it’s more than that, too. For Boyd, a big part of

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this whole transformation is to prove something – to herself and others. Boyd had a series of back surgeries on her spine between 1997 and 2002 after a serious back injury.

First, she says, she felt it would make her more accountable. Like if more people know you’re doing it, you’re less likely to quit.

“I was left with numbness in part of my left leg as well as chronic pain from a damaged sciatic nerve. At one time, doctors told me I wouldn’t walk again,” she says, but she refused to accept that, and, she says, “plowed through the years working on how to live with it.”

Second, she wanted people to know that living healthy is a choice they have to make in life. “The choice that no matter what life throws at you, choose yourself, and better, healthier living,” she says.

Through a chronic pain specialist, Boyd received a neuro-stimulator implant which does two things – helps her cope with the pain and tells her brain to move her leg.

“Through all of this time, I developed a bit of an eating disorder,” she says. “I simply didn’t eat. I would go up to 10 hours not eating and then when I did, it wasn’t healthy foods, it was snack foods, so a huge part of this process was to learn how to eat properly and often.”

Boyd says McCart’s dedication to her and her goals has been vital part of her success thus far. “She pushes me and she also encourages me to be better. I watched Tara in her own journey (McCart lost 48 pounds in eight months) and strive to be more like her,” Boyd says.

“Tara is not teaching weight loss, Tara is teaching a lifestyle and it is a lifestyle that I have always wanted and for the first time I feel like I am on the right track.”

So why would someone want this struggle to be a

public one in front of their small community, where everyone knows everyone – and people talk.

Boyd believes there is much more than weight loss happening during this process.

“You become a better individual, stronger, clear-minded and, most importantly, happier. You function better at work and you make a better wife, mother, because you love yourself. I know it sounds corny, but (it’s) true.”

Which makes it no surprise that Boyd plans to keep the momentum going into 2017. “For me this is a life-long track, now,” she says. “My personal goals are to be fit and healthy and in a perfect world weighing in at 155 pounds,” she says.

“This 90-day promotion was to just show people that if you make a commitment to something, you can do it – no matter your hurdles.”

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