Parks and Recreation: My Magical Weight Loss Secret.

I’ve lost eight pounds in the last two weeks.  Yep, eight.

March is a busy time here in Central Florida.  Within a two to three week span, all local counties and colleges go on spring break.  This year, we were fortunate that our family from Pennsylvania was coming down during their break.  The Family Invasion was soon to begin, so my sixteen-year-old daughter, Erica, and I geared up for a week of fun and frolic at the local parks.

The Family had purchased tickets to Disney World (all the Disney Parks), Sea World, and Universal Studios.  Oh my.  I shuddered at the thought of traipsing through the parks during spring break.

You see, Erica and I hold annual passes to Universal.  She and I are more into the witches and muggles—not so much the princesses and fairy tales.  Couple that with the fact that she just started riding roller coasters this year.  Universal just suits us better.  

Now, I’m not putting down the House of Mouse.  I do rather enjoy the villainous side of Disney.  I always imagined I’d make a perfect Evil Queen and I do so love the new Angelina Jolie version of Maleficent. 

Anyway, I digress.  Back to the weight loss. 

I would never describe myself as an active person.  I cringe at the thought of exercise and hold a secret suspicion of those physically fit people who are always out running.  They run in the rain, they run in the grueling, lava-like heat of a Florida July.  They have special heart-rate monitors strapped to their muscled, glistening biceps and even jog in place when they’re forced to pause at a red light.  Really people?  It can’t be that much fun, can it?

So, I just grasp my grocery bag of chips and crackers, clutching it closer to my chest when I see them run by in swirls of neon-colored coordinating workout gear.

My lack of activity made me extremely lethargic.  I mean, couch potatoes probably get more activity than me.  It doesn’t help that my profession of choice is writing.  

Not a lot of calories burned when killing people with a keyboard.  I know this because last year my husband went to a physician/ director’s retreat for a local hospital.  The hospital gave out FitBits for each family.  He proudly came home with two of these gadgets and I scoffed.

Yes, I scoffed.  Scoffing is one of my favorite things to do, especially when exercise or budgets are mentioned.  He said the hospital had created a competition.  The lazy competitor in me almost bought in to it, but then I remembered some of the people I’ve seen at these special getaways.  Yep, the same ones I distrust so.  I bet the husbands and wives had matching heart-rate monitors.  Ugh.  No thank you.

So, when I realized the FitBit gave me no credit for my mental skills on the keyboard, I gave mine to our daughter and my husband gave his back to the hospital.  After all, we weren’t joining their secret society of health-conscious-exercise freakdom.

Then, one day I took the FitBit back from Erica  She wasn’t using it, so I figured I’d wear it when we went to Universal. 

I was amazed at how much walking we did in one day!  All of it was logged on the FitBit and synced through the magic of wifi to my iPhone.  Wow.  I got exercise by just hanging out with my kid.  Pretty cool stuff.  But I wasn't quite sold--yet.  

Given my distaste for physical activity, I am no stranger to exercise.  I have tried many things in the past.  I’ve bought memberships to gyms—that went unused.  I’ve bought exercise equipment—that became handy places to hang clothes.  For several months of insanity a few years ago, I even had my best friend, Traci’s husband, Gary, a personal trainer, come over to my house five days a week!

Yes, five days a week.  He would come between 6:00 and 6:30 every morning.  Oh my God.  I thought I was going to die.  It is nearly impossible to beg off when someone is coming to your house before you’ve had your morning coffee.  I mean, Gary’s already on his way by the time I’ve decided I don’t want to do this anymore.  

It was hard.  He never let me make excuses.  When I was injured with a sprained ankle, he’d just shift my exercises to avoid the ankle.  Brutal.  I began calling him Mr. Get Your Sh## and Get Out.  I hated it.  I hated him.  But I was healthy and more fit than I’d probably ever been.  I was strong and back down to a size six.  But it still sucked. 

Then Traci and Gary went on a long trip.  I had been freed from his reign of terror on my fat stores.  My activity level plunged and the couch became my friend again. 

Also, I was in school getting my paralegal degree.  I had to stop the personal training.  And the weight crept back.  And by crept back, I mean it piled on me, creating a muffin top that spilled over my jeans, causing my button-up blouses to pucker at my chest.  It weighed me down—punny, I know—so I turned away from my closet in disgust.

You see, weight gain is no mystery.  It is a combination of poor eating and drinking choices, and lack of activity.  No mystery.  Yes, I know for some people there is a valid physiological disorder that inhibits their metabolism.  I’m not talking about you all, so don’t get all sensitive.  This isn’t about you.  It’s about me. 

I’m no dummy.  I know these facts, yet I still resisted.  Why?  Because regardless of how much weight the scale screamed up at me, I still fit into most of my clothes.  I’m lucky like that, I suppose.  Then I had to start creeping into size eights.  Then the size tens made a debut in my closet.  I was bouncing between sizes in my wardrobe.  But that dang scale was not nice about its factual display of my ever-increasing girth.  And yes, I may have popped a button or two. 

I didn't realize how out of shape I'd become until I went to Ireland last October.  I booked myself a tour to Northern Ireland and one of the stops was the Carrick-a-Rede Bridge.  It's a rather short, unless you're on it, rope bridge that spans from the cliffs to a tiny island.  The twenty-minute hike to the bridge was no problem.  The stairs didn't scare me.  They were all going downhill.  But when I had to make that long hike back, my tour buddy had to keep stopping to wait for me to catch my breath.  I swear I saw the pearly gates when I glanced up the second set of long stairs.  I told my travel buddy to go on.  "Leave, save yourself, " I gasped, "I'll just die here on the green cliffs of County Antrim."  Nothing like embarrassing yourself in a foreign country to make you wake up and smell the Cheese-Its.  

Fast forward to this month, the Family was coming for a visit.  The Northern Invasion was about to descend upon us here in Orlando.  Ugh.  All those parks, all that food, all those tourists.

Well, like the trooper I am, I bought Erica and I the Florida resident passes to Disney and I volunteered to take the teenagers to Universal one day.  Yep, I can be pretty magnanimous when I want to be.

So here we are at the meaty center of my diabolical plan to shed weight and have some fun.  Would you believe me if I told you it all happened by accident?

Well, it did.  So, there!

We kicked off the week at the Magic Kingdom.  Now, when Erica and I go to a park, we are serious about getting in and getting out.  If someone were to film us, I’m certain we’d look like we were running the Amazing Race.  We dodge and weave through the milling throngs like they’re standing still.  It’s an art form we’ve perfected. 

We chuckle at the people that stop to take a picture in front of the castle, or the globe.  Those silly tourists, how cute they are.  How fortunate for us.  Because, while they are stopping to take their lasting-memory-selfie, we are already in a very short line for the first ride.  Before those tourists have made it back to Space Mountain or Gringotts, we’re already getting off our second ride. 

Yes, we hustle.  Now, before you say that I’m just a park-going-drill-sergeant, take a look at my Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook.  See all those pictures?  We take them when we’re done.  Because, guess what?  The things are still there when we get off the ride!  Unbelievable, right? 

The first day at Disney, my FitBit alerted me that I’d already walked my daily requirement and gotten one hour of “active minutes” in by 1:30.  So, I was done for the day.  I was also dead tired.  So, I handed my beautiful daughter off to the Family and I left.  They may have scoffed at me for leaving so early, but oh well.  I live here.  I can always come back. 

The next day I took the teens to Universal.  We went to Universal Studios and Island of Adventures twice in one day.  For those of you who don’t know, it’s two different parks that are rather close together.  It can be done. 

By 5:00, my FitBit app was giving me super-smiley faces telling me I’d doubled my miles and tripled my activity from the day before.  I thought I glimpsed Death in his creepy cloak, but it was probably just a tall kid wearing his Hogwarts robe.  Either way, I was beat.

At both parks, in two days, I’d probably consumed an entire day’s worth of calories during one meal each day.  Let’s not forget the awesome Dole Whip at the Magic Kingdom, the beer I had at Three Broomsticks, and the Butter Beer we snagged in Diagon Alley. 

For the rest of the week, I stayed home with family.  We ran around a bit, but nothing to the level of those two days.  We lounged.  We ate.  We drank. 

I lost five pounds that week.  Five pounds.  From having fun.  Wow.

I’m now down eight pounds.  Sure, I’ve been watching what I stuff in my face.  If I want chips, I eat some.  I put them in a tiny bowl and eat them.  I don’t refill the bowl, unless, of course, my husband is snagging some from my bowl.  Then I refill it.  Because sharing is caring, but I am still entitled to my own fair share of the small bowl of chips. 

So there you have it.  My amazing weight loss secret.  Having fun!  Weird, right? 

But we don’t have Universal—or the Magic Kingdom—you say.  Well, do you have a park?  Someplace fun you or your kids like to visit?  Just go.  Get out and do something—anything.

I’m a fan of disguising my exercise in order to trick myself into being active.  So I shall continue this trickery for as long as it takes.  I’m on a mission to look better, to feel better.  It’s working for me, and that, my friends is all that matters.  Find something that works for you. 

And if you have fun while doing it?  Well, you get bonus points, for sure!

Perspective: When counting words began to count.

A few years ago, I decided I needed to go back to school.  Yeah, I was getting old(er) and I thought to myself:  "Hey, You!  You're getting older!  Don't you think you should get an official degree?"

So, terrified beyond measure, I enrolled in the local community college, Valencia, and started on the path to enlightenment--or is that the path to edification?  Anyhow, it had been over 20 years since I last traversed the halls of academia, so I was not too surprised that I failed my math placement tests.

Yeah, I probably could have studied for them, but why bother?  I mean, math and I went way, way back, and we never had a great relationship.  So, I was rather pleased that I'd have to take the remedial math courses in order to carry on to College Algebra.  So I did.  I took two such math courses before any of my math counted towards a degree.  Doesn't seem at all fair, now does it?  Well, I suppose when you're old(er) and not so much wiser in the realm of Quadratic things, it is a necessary evil.

I attacked my general education requirements like a winning team attacks their ice cream sundaes.  Plowing through them until I was left with mostly my chosen degree classes.  Now, my advisor, at the time, warned me that I shouldn't take all those hard paralegal courses together like that.  She said they'd be too much and I had no gen-ed courses to act as a buffer to all the legal classes.  But I was undaunted by her warnings and again, I plowed ahead.

During that time, I was the chairwoman for a local charitable gala, I started homeschooling my daughter, and I still had my mother-wife-daughter duties.

One of the most annoying parts of the program was the requirements that were set forth by the state requiring all students in freshman and sophomore years to complete a minimum of 6,000 words per year.  Oh.  My.  God.  Six thousand words in one year.

I mean, how can one possibly fathom the awful savagery of it all?  Right?  If you are a college student, you feel me.

Of course, those 23 page research papers, the legal briefs, the explications, the speeches, the lit reviews all added up to a whopping SIX THOUSAND--or more--words per year.  Wow.

I thought I was all worded out by the end of those two-and-a-half years.  Yeah, I took over two years to get my paralegal degree.  See the paragraph above where I explain all the other things I was doing at the time!

But I got my degree in Paralegal Studies.  In fact, I graduated with a 4.0.  Then, I decided that I didn't really want to be a paralegal.  I'm more of a creative type of person.  I wanted to just...write.

So, I took a poetry class.  That was fun.  It sparked something in me that had been long-dormant.  It sparked my inner story teller.  It allowed me to just shut up and listen to the voices that are always in my head and give them a voice.

When I began writing Reset, I had no idea how to go about writing a novel.  I thought I had to have all my characters mapped out, the plot clearly diagramed in some weird mapping program, and a set writing schedule.

I had none of those things.

But, I did have the voices.  They wanted to be heard.  Tia Jameson wanted to tell her story.  So, I decided to just let her do that.

Then, one day, my dear friend, Jill, came over and we started discussing the hows and whys and whens of writing a novel.  Ugh.  I don't like that part at all.  She started saying things like:  "You have to get the arc of your novel.  Let's look at word count."

Arc?  Word count?  No...that sounds like work.

So, back to that whole word count thing.  Now I count them, I sure do.  Because that is what publishers and such do.  So, when in Rome...and so on and so forth.

Reset, contained 88,544 words before revisions.  By my rough calculations, that's 14 years worth of 6,000 word requirements!  After revisions and final edits, Reset was 80,068 words.  

The process of writing a novel was...well, very new to me.  One could even say it was...novel.  Ha.  Couldn't help it. :)  But putting it all into perspective, I'd write an 80,000 word novel over ten or twelve essays, explications, or briefs any day old day.

I now spend my days looking at that word counter at the bottom of the page.  I'm still trying to find the arc of my novel.  Maybe it's somewhere under the rainbow?

Perhaps it's waiting for me beside the pot of gold.

The Birth of a Novel.

I am so excited to share my first novel, Reset, with you all!

The concept for Reset came to me four years ago.  I had family visiting during spring break and I began furiously writing.  I wanted to get the story out as fast as it was coming to me.  One of my nieces and my daughter were reading each chapter as soon as I’d finish it.  Then my family left and went back to their respective hometowns and my novel was once again put on the back burner.

There were many factors as to why I didn’t finish it at the time.  The big one being quite simple—life.  It has a tendency of getting in the way.  I let it.  Of course, there was the simple fact that I was trying to get my teen-aged daughter through middle school while obtaining a difficult degree in paralegal studies.  There was also the fact that I was hugely involved with some local charities that were taking tremendous amounts of my time.  Let’s not forget that I have ADHD and tend to jump from one task to another, so fast the glasses shake in the kitchen—Squirrel!

Oh, sorry.  I got distracted.  Regardless of the excuses, Reset sat silently on a jump drive, waiting to be written.  I ignored it.  I acted like it didn’t exist.  I denied it the light of day, because I was too busy.

I was also petrified.  How could I possibly think that I could write anything that anyone would really want to read?  How could I be qualified to write one book, much less a trilogy?  All those doubts piled on top of the idea and squashed it like a ketchup packet in the glove box.

Sure, I met established authors who’d always just tell me:  “Just write.”  Okay.  Well, then.  Thanks for that nugget of golden knowledge plucked from the tree of life.  No kidding.  Just write.  Simple enough right?  No.  Not really.

It was like thinking about having a child.  It’s too soon.  I’m not ready.  Will I be a good parent?  Will my kid hate me?  Will others hate me when my kid is loud and annoying in a nice restaurant?  Do I have the time for a child right now?  Will I go broke having this child?  Am I truly qualified to be a parent?

Yeah.  The doubts were firmly entrenched in me.  So I studied the law, and I did quite well in my degree.  I graduated last summer with a 4.0.  I was one of only three people in my program with such high marks.  That seemed safe and easy compared to thinking about broaching the mountain of writing a novel.

But one of my English comp professors befriended me after I was done with the program.  She asked me to sit in on her poetry class.  Okay.  Sure.  Why not?  I had  graduated, but I was floundering for purchase in the new world of the educated.  So I did.  It wasn’t long after that I remembered I had a passion for writing.

I love the freedom that comes from writing.  Whether it’s poetry or fiction, I just love writing.  So that one little class reignited the dying spark of my writing.

After the poetry class ended, I began searching for the original version of Reset.  I couldn’t find it!  It wasn’t on the old laptop I had used four years ago, because we’d wiped it when it got sick.  Those nasty computer viruses.  Frantically I searched high, low, wide, and tall for the back up version of my book.

I finally found it on a backup hard drive and I printed it out.  There were only six chapters done.  With my newfound courage and confidence, I began re-writing Reset.  I got up to four chapters and I asked my dear friend, Jill Sebacher, to read it.

I wanted her opinion on whether or not it should be written in first or third person.  Jill reluctantly agreed to read it.  All the while she was praying that it was half-way decent.  She never agrees to read people’s books.  It’s just too difficult to tell someone what they wrote is crap.  Besides, we’d just become friends and she didn’t want to destroy our friendship by telling me I should consider writing the directions on shampoo bottles.  You know, lather, rinse, and repeat.  Riveting, I’m sure.

But she didn’t think it was crap.  She also wanted me to keep Reset in first person.  Switching it to a third person perspective would completely lose Tia’s voice.  I concurred and so I continued writing.  Jill pushed me mercilessly the entire way.  She wanted two chapters at a time to read—purely for content.  She was not in editor mode, or teacher mode.  She just wanted to enjoy it as it developed.

So that is how it began.  I liken writing a novel to being pregnant.  At first, the novel is but a seedling—an egg.  It doesn’t exist as a living breathing entity until it is fertilized and nurtured.  For nine months (more or less depending on the mother and child), that egg grows into a fetus, still living inside its mother.  That’s the writing phase.  It’s all creation.  The feeding and nurturing of your baby from within.

Then, BAM!  That baby is done cooking and out it comes.  Well, my dear friends. That is not the end of the stretch marks or the agony.  When was the last time someone handed out a user manual for raising a child into a good and proper human being?  Never?  Yep, that’s about right.

So the editing and revising phase is the time between the actual birth of the child to the time that child goes off to college.  That was the most brutal part for me.  I was not prepared for how hard it would be.  I simply had no idea that baby I had created could possibly be better.  What?  You mean my words didn’t sprout like manna from the heavens?  I’m not the next JK Rowling?  Really?  OMG.

So, yeah.  That happened.  It hurt.  Basically, it sucked.  If I’d known it would be so brutal, I probably wouldn’t have done it.  But I did.  And as brutal as it was, just like giving birth without pain killers, I think the end result here well justified the means.  Ultimately, us women always warn our friends when they are thinking of having a child.  We relay horror stories of the birthing process.  We describe how our lives (and bodies) will never be the same post baby.  But then we see that bundle of pure joy and we think…yeah.  I did good.  I made that.  Look everyone, I created something pretty awesome.

According to author John Green:  “Pain demands to be felt.”  Well, I concur.  But, pain also lessens and dulls with time.  In my case, not too much time.  However, I am perfectly okay with enduring the pain of revising and editing if I can offer my readers the best possible read.  I’m game for that.  Let’s do this.

So here I go.  I am embarking on Book 2 of my Reset Trilogy.  I go into this fully prepared.  My diaper bag is packed.  I am ready with a good bottle (or three) of wine and possibly a giant bottle of Aleve.  I know that all children are different.

This child may be a little schizophrenic or have multiple personality disorder.  Who knows?  Maybe I do.  Maybe, if you were paying attention…I just gave you a peek at how I will be approaching Resist.  Hmm…