A desire to keep ‘disgusting’ traditional medicines from growing up is AF Drinks’ Lisa King’s best secret to staying healthy, writes Rebecca Wadey.
Lisa King is one of Aotearoa’s most well-known female entrepreneurs. after foundation eat my lunch with Michael Meredith seven years ago, King recently stepped down from that company’s day-to-day operations to focus on her new business – AF drinks, born during the first lockdown in March 2020.
“We’ve all accepted that smoking is bad for you,” King says. “If someone quit smoking, you would never ask them why or make them feel bad about it.”
King says she rarely gets sick because “Chinese herbs are absolutely disgusting.”
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“Growing up, we avoided getting sick. They are just so dirty.”
King remembers taking ginseng and bird’s nest as a child and drying deer penises on the clothesline. “So I don’t get sick at all. Panadol is super effective for me because I never have to take it.”
She shares her insights into merging work and home, and staying healthy.
Have you set boundaries between work and private life, or are they merging?
My work is part of my life and often involves family, social and personal. I don’t see them as individual areas that I need to keep separate (and mainly because I run AF from home).
My kids were 6 and 8 when we started Eat My Lunch, and to watch them grow a business out of our house from day one into what it is today, and they see the same thing with AF, they make the connections of the work it takes is to get it to that point.
Hopefully it will serve them well in the future if they want to start their own business. So many people want to start their own business and they have a romantic idea of what it entails. The work it takes to get there is quite another thing.
What time do you wake up?
I am definitely not a morning person, which made it incredibly difficult at first when I got up at 4am for Eat My Lunch.
My body didn’t like that at all. I get up around 7 am to go to school, but I am a night person. I get so much energy at night that my best time to work is probably 7pm to midnight.
What do you have for breakfast?
I start with coffee and eat later at 9 or 10 am. I don’t like cereal or cold food. When I have time, I like to eat something like porridge or even noodles. I wish in New Zealand we had small stalls selling congee and noodles like in Asia.
When we were little, my mom used to cook the rice cooker overnight and that’s what we would have for breakfast. My parents opened the first Chinese medical clinic in New Zealand about 35 years ago, and I was told you should have something warm in the morning.
Cameron Burnell/Fairfax NZ
Lisa King is one of Aotearoa’s most well-known female entrepreneurs.
Whose advice/influence do you value and really listen to when it comes to wellbeing and taking care of yourself?
I am a fairly rational person and my sister is a doctor. So I only listen to scientifically or medically proven advice.
You read so much conflicting information, especially about diets, and it’s hard to get a good idea of what’s real and what’s not. Especially with social media.
I am good friends with “Nanogirl” Dr Michelle Dickinson† I always call and ask her questions. “Does this collagen powder actually do anything?” It’s good to have those people in your life who can give you proof. Especially with Covid.
There was just so much misinformation. I recently had a full medical and DNA analysis, which showed that I’m – genetically – sensitive to alcohol, caffeine and wheat, so I cut back on that.
How do you deal with the stress of failure?
As an entrepreneur, the chance of failure is quite high. Over the years I’ve had to learn to accept that things are going to fail or go wrong. Now I know that failure doesn’t mean the end of everything – more often than not it leads to something better.
It’s an opportunity to learn, change what you do and move on quickly. So now I see failures as mini-lessons rather than stressful events of doom.
I’m not such a reflective person, I’m more forward-looking. Eat My Lunch certainly helped with that. There were really hard times.
What it taught me was that being in the middle of it feels like the end of the world, but it’s only temporary. Having experience builds resilience and mental strength.
I talk a lot with my partner. He’s very good at calming me down, but I’ve always been incredibly self-sufficient. When we were very young, my parents had a restaurant, so they weren’t home much. We had to fend for ourselves and were very independent.
Favorite free stress buster?
This may sound strange, but I like shopping at the supermarket. So when I’m feeling stressed, I go to the grocery store on my own and shop all the aisles for about an hour. Then I come home and cook. Cooking is such a liberation for me at the end of the day.
What’s the biggest change you’ve made when it comes to taking care of your health, mental health, and well-being?
I stopped drinking just before our first lockdown. I suffered from pretty severe dizziness.
I may drink occasionally, but I haven’t really missed drinking alcohol in my life. It certainly helped me sleep better and gave me the ability to deal with high pressure and stressful situations with greater clarity.