Update on the word count rising & weight falling
It’s been five days since I decided to get my fat butt in gear and make it smaller, while getting my lazy butt in gear and making my WIP larger.
The good news? In five days of removing the crap I always eat, and putting in a minimum of 30 minutes per day exercising (cold this week, so it’s mostly been on treadmill), I’ve lost five pounds. But those were the easy ones; I know it won’t be a pound a day. If it was, hey, in a few months I might all but disappear…
Bad news? I’ve let the day job and its various tendrils that seep into my non-day job life overwhelm my sense of writing, and let it ruin my motivation for writing, so my word count is terrible. In five days, just under 2000 words. NOT the 1k per day of my goal. The silver lining is I still have 45 days to go, and I can easily get back on track with this – IF (all caps) I can just separate the job from the job.
With that brief update out of the way, I’m off to conference call #1 of two today, but hope to get back into the WIP this afternoon and evening. Wish me luck…
LUCK!!!!
Congrats on the -5 lbs. As for weight loss, I have had a great deal of success with a paleo-style diet. Went from 270 to under 220 with no hunger, and better all-around health. And it’s easy to keep the weight off, too.
Is this something new? Paleo diet? It sounds like something very old, but I have not heard of this. (I am interested in it from the stats you posted. I am 285 and have started a weight regime at the Y)
It’s been around for a bit. It’s akin to Adkins, a low-carb diet. The basic idea is that we evolved to eat a very different diet – one that is not composed largely of flour, refined sugar, and high-fructose corn syrup. These carbs – especially these specific carbs – have metabolic effects. Primarily, they trigger an insulin response from the body, which causes you to sock away energy as fat. If you cut back on calories without changing the composition of your food intake, losing weight remains difficult.
By removing those elements from your diet, you don’t have to cut calories. Weight more or less comes off automatically, because your body is no longer storing away energy as fat at the same level. Instead, that energy is available for use, and you have higher energy levels.
There’s a lot of research that indicates that hypertension, obesity, heart disease, diabetes – the metabolic syndrome – are all connected. Paleo advocates say that the connection is simply huge intake of carbs far beyond what we were evolved to handle.
The best place to start is Gary Taubes’ book, Why We Get Fat – or if you want more science, his first book, Good Calories, Bad Calories. Goes into detail on how nutrition science got to where it is.
There’s also many good websites. I’d recommend starting here: http://www.archevore.com/get-started/
I tell you, I wouldn’t be writing a book if I hadn’t changed my diet. Without the energy and general feeling better, I probably wouldn’t have gotten to it. The science behind it makes sense, you end up eating better food (whole foods, not processed), and you lose weight without starving yourself.
Along with the diet, I also started lifting weights – I’d highly recommend Body By Science by Doug MgGuff for high intensity/minimum time investment workouts. Also, really, really effective. I look completely different than I did a year and a half ago. I exercise a 1/2 hour a week, and eat as much as I want – I’m just careful what I eat, and how I exercise.
Never give up or as the Beiber says, “Never say Never”
I too know the pain of real llife interferring with writing. Keep at you goals and in time you will find that balance (still working on it here!)