Jim's Mowing CEO, Jim Penman on his diet, fitness and discipline + plus more! with host Joel Kleber

Hi, everyone, this is Joel Cleaver from Jim's Group hq. And today we are on with another episode of the jimscast. After last week's very fiery Science v Religion debate, which was not much of a debate whatsoever. It was more of an interview by an atheist where I just got smashed and bombarded. So what was your reaction to that from anyone who you've sent it to?

Oh, I've passed it to some of my Christian contacts and they were quite interested, like I showed my pastor and somebody else who's on Christian radio. Yeah, I thought it was good.

And I say, go easy on the young man next time. Or someone.

People do feel sorry for you, I must say. In Ask Gym, they say, why you make fun of Joel all the time.

Yeah, all the time. But that's what the job is. So what we do today is you're quite. We're sort of thrashing around bit topics and that. You come on, you come over to my desk one day. So let's do one on fitness, nutrition and health. Because you're a big believer in that. Let's talk about that. What your thoughts on that, what routines you have and some advice.

Well, I'm just a huge believer in. In fitness, it's kind of one of those things that people just don't put the effort into. They should. I have a half hour a day at the moment. What I do is I have 20 minutes on the treadmill normal days, and then 10 minutes on a rowing machine. I usually go for a half hour, very brisk walk at the same time. On Friday and Saturday, I tend to work on my farm, which is usually several hours a day. So I just find, even though it's not something you always want to do, the difference it makes is phenomenal because I know I've just turned 68 and I'm just full of beans and energy and enthusiasm and optimism and stuff. And I look at people even close to my age and they're getting old. I think that short period of time when you just do the thing you don't always feel like doing, it has such an immense impact. And also on mood too. My mood is overall. I mean, I'm in a great situation. I have a very happy marriage, business that I love and church and everything else. But all the same thing, fitness is the biggest single contributor to mood that there is.

And you said you started rowing as well. Used to be purely running, now you've done rowing. Yeah. Mixing it up.

Well, I started rowing because I hurt my foot, so it was hard to run. So I got a rowing machine which isn't about 300 bucks, not that expensive. And I found that it's good because it's upper body exercise like that. So I do that. It's quite. It's quite tough, mostly because you get sore sitting down. But I find the combination of the two because they also reckon that it's not just aerobic fitness, it's also strength training is good. So that's really. You got to pull very hard against that. So I think that's. That's a good combination. You want a bit of upper and lower. What I'm really looking forward to is getting our sporting complex here.

What's going to be in there?

The pool will be enclosed and heated. There'll be a gymnasium and there'll be a racquetball court. And I must say, it's all good, but I'm really looking forward to the racquetball court. That is really vigorous exercise, which is so fun.

I can imagine you are. And Jim plays a lot. And if you go to YouTube the day in the life of Jim, you'll see him there.

I can't moment. They shut down our club because of the virus. Really? You can't play there anymore, right?

Well, even with the new change conditions, you can't.

Well, last time I checked, no, it's.

Still not open yet.

Okay, that's interesting, but hopefully very soon. But it's good, actually. It's one way of getting fit that's actually fun. And I'm a fairly competitive sort of character, so that, you know, when I'm up against somebody having a hard fight, you will just kill yourself and you'll enjoy doing it.

I watched a play before when we had to film that. We watched it. It was good. Done well.

Well, you should get onto it.

I'll give you a game. I can move around a bit more now.

Can you?

Yeah, I'm not too bad.

So I would really hope that for at least five days a week when I'm not on my farm, I'd much rather play racquetball than anything else. Yeah, Warren. Warren Buffett has a racquetball court in his place.

Really?

Yeah.

Okay. Didn't know that at all. I was going to say now as well. You're very fanatical about your weight. You weigh yourself every morning. Maybe you don't tell people about. Why do you have that?

The mistake people make is they. Is they. Is they let themselves put on weight until they suddenly find they've gained 10 kilos. And that's a really bad time to think about it because when you gain 10 kilos, it's very, very hard to take off. And what happens too is you put on 10 kilos, you, you take off 10 kilos. Your body is called yo yo dieting. It's very, very difficult and your body tends to go back to where it was before. Now what I like to do is to make sure my weight doesn't go up more than one or two kilos at the most before I really clamp down and start doing something about it. So one of the things I'm doing right now is called a 16:8 diet, which is that you have all your food between eight hours a day. And so what I try and do is to finish all my food at 7 o' clock in the evening, have an earlyish dinner, which is better anyway, and then I don't eat until midday the following day. So I just. Now I've come back, I had some oatmeal for breakfast, but my breakfast was like quarter past 12.

Yeah. Intermittent fasting. Yeah, it's a trend thing at the moment.

So yeah, it actually there's this thing that goes on in your cells if you don't, if you don't feed them for, if you fast for a while, it allows them, they, they, they go into repair mode. They're not always. There's a thing called mtor, where they're actually functioning. And then if you don't feed them for a while, there's a thing called autophagy or something like that which enables them to renew and they get rid of all the nasty stuff and they recycle it and they do all kinds of really useful things. Our bodies are designed to fast occasionally, so fasting for like a day or two is a lot. But actually just fasting for 16 hours is not difficult at all.

You don't really feel it. I've been doing it, I've been in it for a while now. Not something really deliberately, but I saw the science and I thought, okay, so from 12 to 8 is my window. So 12 to 8. And it's mainly good foods. I don't worry about counting calories or whatever. It's just good foods between 12 to 8 o' clock. And then you feel a lot better because people eat before sleep and you shouldn't do that, you know, it's very hard.

So you're doing 168 too, are you?

Yeah, I've always, I've been to it for around a year and I just make sure I eat good food between the 12 and 8. But it's been naturally good because when I wake up, I don't want to eat anything, you know, do some fasted cardio on a bike and have a coffee at 12 o' clock and then have a couple of meals or.

They reckon it's better too, if you do exercise before you eat.

Yes.

It actually burns off more. I found since I've been doing. My weight's been going down. Yeah, it's about 65 and a half kilos right now. Ideally, I'd like to be on 64, but that's not. That's not too easy to achieve.

But you're right. As people get older, I've got to really worry about their weight. You know, you can't. You can't carry that weight. I'm a bit. I'm younger, so I can carry a bit more weight now, but as I get older, I've got to try and trim down, which I'm not going to probably like to do. But it gets harder as you get older. Yeah, I can imagine at my age.

People tend to have too much there and it's not. It's not good at all.

Yeah, well, bikes obviously put it all around there and that's something which is a bit hard. And, you know, we have a lot of some blokes in the office who have been doing a bit to try and lose the battle, you know, sort of reduce that weight around there. Is it because they're a bit older now as well? It's something that's really concerning.

Well, I'm very concerned. I want to do anything possible for people to be healthy at the office too. That's why the fruit. Fruit from Jim's Home Fresh. While the staff were around, we had those two boxes delivered and that was great because that tended to drive away the chocolates and stuff. And the fresh fruit was good.

Well, for people listening or watching, we have an office here. You come here, there's a table there and people used to come in and bring donuts and chocolates and everything like that. And if it's there, people would eat it. Right. So now the boxes are home fresh. Were there and there no more chocolates, which was good.

Well, there's not no more.

Well, sometimes I do, I stay, but there's less. Yeah, but you do the altruistic thing and you come over and you eat the chocolates to make sure no one else eats it. All right.

I do too.

Yeah.

I have a bad thing for chocolate. I don't find it easy. Actually, you know what? I find it's good. What I can eat is dark chocolate. I get an old gold with nuts in it and I have that. And apparently if you don't have milk in it, it's not too bad. And chocolate itself is actually quite good for you. It's all the fat in the milk chocolate that's really bad.

There's a lot of really good, like, let's say, healthy chocolate companies now, the duck kale from Colombia and all that sort of stuff. And it's all this organic chocolate and give it back to charities and stuff. It's expensive, but it' nice.

I actually. I tried some different varieties. I had one which is 90% coke, cacao or something like that, and that was just. Can't eat it.

Yeah, well, it's not your traditional taste. So if you used to. If you eat the Cadbury milk chocolate, you know, that's the one you sort of grow up on. Right. Whereas you have those ones. It's a completely different tasting thing. That's probably more real chocolate than, you know, the other things. So.

But chocolate is. Even though it's got too much. Even though dark chocolate's got too much sugar in it, it's actually. It's a very positive and beneficial kind of food from other points of view. So it's part of like a Mediterranean diet. Dark chocolate can be part of that. People in the Mediterranean countries, especially Greece is the extreme example, they tend to have a bit of weight on, but they have very, very low death rate from things like cardiovascular. From heart.

Yeah. They do, don't they? Yeah, because a lot of the oils, olives, all that sort of stuff, a lot of meats.

So I tend to eat. I'm not a fanatical about it. I mean, when they buy the Nutella, they always have to try and hide it. It's just a family joke because otherwise I tend to grab it, put it in rice bin or somewhere to get away from me. So I really have a problem with that kind of stuff. But if I don't have sweet stuff around. You have. We always have lots of fruit at home.

Yeah.

Always piled high with fruit on the kitchen bench. So if you want to stack on something. And now it's only between those. Those hours, 12 and 7 normally that I eat anyway. So it's just easy to go and grab an apple or grab a mandarin or grab some berries or something like that.

How are you finding your sleep now with that sort of. Because you're only. Because people tend. A lot of people tend to eat late and they have trouble sleeping. So you're eating between these windows. You find your moods improved or you sleep better or what are the benefits you're seeing besides the lost weight for it?

I sometimes wake in the night anyway. I just wait for an hour or so and read a bit. It doesn't worry me too much. I think when you get older, also when you're older, you need to go to the toilet more often. So you often get up in the night and go. But it's no big deal. I've got some great stuff on my, on my tablet. I just reading books about different things. I'm reading one about African dictators like Mugabe and stuff and how they've gotten to power and what they're doing and all kinds of fascinating stuff.

I was going to say now with your diet, let's talk about your nutrition. So you're big on that. So do you want to tell people a little bit about what you eat during the week?

Yeah, I don't eat a lot of meat, most of them. Occasionally a bit of fish. You know, one or two nights a week we'd have some fish. The only thing I eat at meat is actually for barbecues I have a little patty which is sort of a. It's a four point, it's a four star. So it's reasonably. It's a little tinny chicken patty and I have that on a slice of bread and I have that. And I have cherry tomatoes and roasted corn and some fruit and stuff. So it's. Even though there's a bit of, you might say, processed meat in there, it's not that much. So in actual fact, in an entire week I eat very little meat. I don't really have much of a taste for meat these days. I kind of like vegetarian foods more than. Yeah, I don't, I don't miss meat particularly apart from the barbecue. I just haven't found anything that goes on the barbecue that's really.