Keep Moving Forward!

Among the many changes you'll see in the next few weeks at Healthy Writer blog we've discontinued Inspiration Sundays. However, I hope you’ll agree that this simple quote still deserves a post:

Keep Moving Forward

I’m always inspired by Walt Disney and his words. A man who started with only a creative vision and a talent for drawing began an empire. Growing up near Walt Disney World, it was easy to see the awe inspiring buildings, theme parks, and man-made lakes, but sometimes hard to remember that it all on the same shaky ground as my own writing career.

You probably didn’t know it, but Walt struggled in his early years. He did any work he could including a series of Army education films that would be considered very politically incorrect these days. Like many writers and artists he suffered setbacks: the first studio he founded went bankrupt, he lost the rights to one of his creations (Oswald the Lucky Rabbit), and he couldn’t find a distributor for either of the first two Mickey Mouse films.

Through it all, Walt kept moving forward. He tried new things and refused to look backwards for too long. His philosophy is as useful to writers as it is to people who strive to be healthy. If you’ve missed a work out, eaten an unhealthy meal, skipped a deadline, or failed horribly on a pitch, don’t dwell on it, move forward, and do better next time. As we work hard to reach our goals it’s easy to get sidetracked by the things we should have done instead planning the things we’ll do next. Don’t. Instead, give yourself a little time to look backward, then get back to work. Who knows, maybe someday you’ll be a household name just like Walt.

(This is the first in a series of posts that focus on Walt Disney World, the location of the next Romance Writers of America Conference. I’m not just a rabid Disney fan, I’m also a former employee. I’ve had the honor and the thrill of working in the Disney Reservation Center where we booked all restaurant and hotel reservations. If you have any Disney questions, please post them in the comments.)

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Remember: You're in charge.

The characters in my latest work in progress are behaving badly. They started out just fine: two tough as nails cops, one from homicide, one from robbery. They loved each other but it turned to hate, and now the death of her partner means they had to work together. They fight a lot, snipping at each other over crime scenes, each feeling a romantic and sexual tension but refusing to acknowledge it. But some how they were holding hands, and she was crying, then he was remembering how it used to be and suddenly, after work, they went to the zoo.

The zoo?

Yes, that’s right, my two tough characters ended up eating ice cream cones and laughing at the elephants. I sat down to read what I’d written the day before and realized things had spiraled desperately out of control. Thankfully, as a writer we're in charge. We can always hit the most important key on the keyboard: delete. I deleted line after line: no more zoo, crying, or holding hands. No more mushy stuff, I edited it back to tough cops and heady tension. That tension will be resolved but not with my characters turning into two zoo going softies. That’s not who they are.

The same thing happened in my own life recently. An opportunity came up that I’d long hoped for. I’d daydreamed about how it would be and here it was, all coming true. Except… Not exactly how I wanted it, more than a few significant details were wrong. Yesterday’s daydream was about to become tomorrow’s nightmare. Unfortunately, there was nothing to do but to delete the opportunity from my life.

In your life, as in your writing, it’s important to remember you’re in charge. You’re the one with the pencil, and more importantly, the one with the eraser. You can ask for an opportunity, but then decide it isn’t for you. You can order the chocolate cake but then throw it away. You can write whole chapters and then decide they don’t work.

It’s hard deleting, tough to remove big chunks that represent hours, especially when they still hold a perfect gem of a phrase or the shining glimmer of possibility. Hard, but not impossible, and it's so important; good writing requires good editing. Healthy living needs it too, you can’t be everyone’s friend, take every job, or do everything all at once. So when you’re adding in a healthy diet or healthy exercise, remember to edit out the things that don’t work. Even if you wanted them once, if you thought they were everything you needed, sometimes the healthiest thing you can do is delete.

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It won’t kill you.

My father’s feet turned to clay when I was ten years old. Before then, he stood as a giant who protected me from everything. At 6’3” and 250 pounds, Dad held us up so we could reach the stars. But the year I turned ten Dad was diagnosed with diabetes. My invincible hero turned into a man with cautions attached to his life. The strongest caution accompanied food. I learned early in my Dad’s diagnosis that if he didn’t eat he would die. Being hungry would kill him. I internalized this message a bit too well, and never let myself go more than a few hours without food.

A funny thing happened when I was 29. I spent 24 hours without eating. It wasn’t by choice, there were other things on my mind at the time, not to mention doctors and nurses who ordered me to take only water. Not a single bite or drop of juice for 24 hours and somehow I survived. Since then I’ve disproven the lesson from my childhood over and over again. I’ve actually come to appreciate being a little hungry. It makes me savor my food, helps me look forward to it. Surprisingly, if I push away from the table still slightly hungry, I can go three or four hours before I need to eat again. I will admit to getting “hangry,” a word a friend made up meaning so hungry you’re angry at everyone, but I haven’t died yet.

Another unspoken family rule taught me that exercise wasn’t to be trusted. Exercise hurt. If you did too much, you would have a heart attack and die. If you escaped that fate you were sure to end up with injuries: torn ligaments, pulled muscles, and surely, broken bones. My Aunt who biked regularly had to have knee surgery. She became an example of why it was best to just avoid all of that danger.

I started running in my early twenties. I was (and am) super slow. In addition to surely dying, according to family and friends I risk a number of maladies every time I put on my sneakers: joint degeneration, back pain, knee problems, and (a personal favorite) any minute now my uterus is going to fall out. And yet, like being hungry, running hasn’t killed me. I’ve come to believe it won’t. I even own a t-shirt that says “Running won’t kill you. You’ll pass out first.”

Exercise makes me feel better. It clears up migraines before they really start. It soothes my moods and helps me form strong friendships with other runners. It teaches me that I can pick a goal and stick to it, no matter what. At the end of March Trish challenged us to set a goal and stick with it. I chose running every other day in preparation for a local 5K. In the month since then my grandmother died, I’ve dealt with job issues, and I had to revisit some old fears. Still I ran. Every other day, despite weather, exhaustion, and just plain lack of any desire to, I got out there. My 5K was the day after my grandmother’s burial. I ran. …and it didn’t kill me.

What lessons hold you back? If you took them out and looked at them, would they still be true? Are you willing to give up the security of those lessons to be healthy?

~~~

When she’s not cooking, buying, or dreaming about food, Rachel Kleinsorge writes steamy paranormal mystery romances. She is currently waiting for the call from her agent, the amazing Carolyn Grayson, while working on her next novel.

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Let’s talk about Stress, Baby

Let’s talk about you and me
Let’s talk about all the good things
and the bad things that may be
Let's talk about it
-- Salt-n-Pepa, “Let’s talk about Sex”, 1991, London Records

On sunshiny spring days when you get enough sleep, you don’t have a deadline to worry about, and nothing disturbs your routine, being healthy is easy. You can exercise with no trouble. You have enough time to prepare a healthy meal. You get a chance to unwind with yoga before going to bed. Those steady bread-and-butter days help you meet your weekly writing goal, keep your calories in check, and let you conquer the world.

But stress happens. Good and bad events tax your body causing a physical reaction to emotional events. Good friends die in car accidents or the taxman tells you to prepare for an audit. You move to a new house or get a new puppy. What do you do then?

I’m going to ask you to do something a little uncomfortable and think about the stressful events that are coming up in your life. The plotters will have it easier than the pantsers, but everyone should be able to see the good and bad things that could happen in their future. Maybe your child will graduate from high school soon; maybe your car is making a noise that means a big repair bill. How will you deal with the stress those events bring?

Say you finally get the Call, the one that means you’re going to be published (or published again). Would you call up friends and immediately celebrate with a bottle or two of wine? When your editor sends back revisions that rip your heart to pieces do you dive for the chocolate? Is a favorable review the reason for a night out with a few clandestine cigarettes and dancing until dawn?

The ways you handle stress can help keep you healthy or they can tear you down. You can celebrate with a day at the spa or a bottle of wine. You can console yourself with a pedicure or an entire galloon of ice cream. Think about it and come up with a healthy stress relief plan. Remember, this isn’t an all or nothing decision. Maybe you’ll handle stress with a glass of wine instead of the whole bottle. When my agent offered to represent me I indulged in a pint of strawberries and a few hours at a nightclub, a good balance of healthy and indulgent.

What are the healthy ways you can handle stress? What do you already do to alleviate stress in your life? What do you need to stop doing when life stresses you out?

~~~

When she’s not cooking, buying, or dreaming about food Rachel Kleinsorge writes steamy paranormal mystery romances. She is currently waiting for the call from her agent, the amazing Carolyn Grayson, while working on her next novel.

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A Task a Day

Yesterday, Michelle talked about changing one thing each week to improve one's health and fitness. And I recently read an article in the January issue of Prevention titled "Small Changes that Take Off Big Pounds." Seems like the idea of small changes adding up to long-term success is popular right now, and I have to say I'm a fan. That's how I also tackle writing projects like revisions, especially when the revisions are extensive. Thinking about all the revisions at once is too overwhelming. I have to break them down into manageable chunks. It's also how I attack other tasks like cleaning house, assigning a certain amount of time per day or certain tasks for a certain day. When I receive my RITA entries to judge soon, I'll add up the total number of pages that must be read by the deadline to return scores and divide that by how many days I have. Manageable chunks.

According to the Prevention article, "taking baby steps -- not giant leaps -- is the best way to get lasting results." The article cited a study detailed in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine in which participants who made one small change in their eating habits or exercise level each week lost more than twice the amount of belly fat, 2 1/2 more inches off their waistlines and approximately four times more weight during a program spanning four months than those who followed more common calorie cutting and physical activity recommendations. Those are some nice results, and ones I'd like to experience.

Among the potential changes the article suggested were the ever-present food diary, exercising during every commercial break while watching TV (personally, I exercise while watching the programs and skip through the commercials to save time for other tasks such as writing), walking five minutes more each day, limiting your high-fat foods to one per week, and signing up for healthy e-newsletters such as those available at www.prevention.com/newsletters (I just signed up for several myself).

So I'd like to invite all of you to share what one thing you want to change today. For me, I'm going to reintegrate sit-ups into my daily routine. I'm going to start out with 10 and add 1 more each day. Maybe I can add to the 1.2 pounds I lost last week.

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The Third Monday in January

I heard on NPR recently that the third Monday in January is one of the most depressed days of the year for many. All of the holiday bills have arrived. People feel like they’ve already failed at their New Year’s resolutions, and the current year will not be any different or brighter than the previous year.

We’ve already discussed why setting goals instead of resolutions is a better option, but let’s tackle the question of whether 2010 will be any different or brighter than 2009. Of course it can be if you want it to be and are willing to make some adjustments. There are roughly 50 weeks left in the year, and you don’t have to make all your changes in the first two weeks of 2010.

For many years, January was one of the busiest months of the year for me at work. It was just impossible for me to hit the latest year running on my New Year’s resolutions or goals since I was working killer hours at work. I whined to Trish about it once, and she asked me why I didn’t treat February 1 as my own personal New Year’s Day. What a simple suggestion, but it made all the difference. I started doing that, and my Februaries became so much more productive.

I didn’t try to do everything on February 1 though. I made plans and tried to tackle one area or change at a time. For example, if your goal is to become healthier through changes in diet and exercise, you may want to incorporate one new thing into your life every week. Start off your first week by keeping a food diary. The next week, you may set a goal of going to the gym 2-3 times in the next 7 days. The third week may be devoted to trying to eat at least 3 servings of vegetables a day. During the fourth week, you may want to work in some strength training into your fitness routine by lifting some weights or attending a yoga class. Ideally, you would keep up with each one of these changes so that by the end of the month, you are doing 4 new things that will help you become healthier. At the end of the year, you would have incorporated 52 changes into your lifestyle that make it healthier. A book that looks at weight loss through one change every 4 days is Martha Beck's The Four-Day Win: End Your Diet War and Achieve Thinner Peace.

These changes need not take much time or even effort to implement. Psychology professor Richard Wiseman’s new book 59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot looks at many recent studies on why people act they way they do and is full of steps you can take in less than a minute to change your life. He examines the areas of happiness, persuasion, motivation, creativity (he’s not that wild about brainstorming), attraction, relationships, stress, decision making, parenting, and personality. He critiques where typical self-help and common sense advice get it wrong and shares what the latest scientific studies say will work. If this intrigues you, you can listen online to an hour interview with him entitled Brain Science on NPR’s The Kojo Nnamdi Show before you read the book.

In his chapter on motivation, he reviews how people successfully make big changes in their lives such as losing weight. They must create the ideal plan that identifies what their overall goal is, create a step-by-step plan for how they will achieve that goal, identify the benefits of achieving their overall goal, and go public by sharing their goal with others. He even suggests blogging about it. Does this sound familiar? It does to me because it succinctly captures how I lost 30 pounds last year.

How are you feeling on this third Monday of January? Do you have any stories or advice to share about how you have successfully made changes - big or small - in your life?

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