Tag: Marketing

Keeping The Healthy Coastal Lifestyle a Life Style

As a way to promote my business and practice my writing, particularly with constraints, I have been responding to HARO (Help a Reporter Out) queries.  Three times every weekday, I receive lists of topics from reporters who are looking for source feedback for their articles.  Categories include business/finance, health & medicine, lifestyle, entertainment, travel, and so forth.  Interested persons reply to the queries and, if accepted, their responses are included in the article, either digital or print, with mentions of their business.  I got my first mention in a blog post that came out yesterday.  You can read that article here.

This morning I responded to a query from a reporter looking for success tips from people who have lost 20+ pounds and kept it off.  I thought I’d share with you what I shared with that reporter.  I’m not including the “common sense” stuff about cutting sugary drinks for water and exercising every day.

My tips for healthy lifestyle success:

(1) Just do it, anyway.  When I don’t want to go out for that walk, I grab the sneakers and walk anyway.  When I don’t really feel like going to aerobics, I grit my teeth and do it, anyway.  I find a “commitment” activity.  Though it was humid out this summer, once I grabbed a pair of socks, I mentally committed to walking.  (I keep a pile of clean, paired socks beside my bed, so I can just reach down and grab a pair.  Boom!  Commitment before I get out of bed.)

(2) Ignore weight.  The scale just tells us about our relationship with gravity.  When you’re improving your health through changing food choices and adding exercises, it’s common not just to lose fat but also to build muscle.  A pound of muscle weighs as much as a pound of fat (so no weight change between losing that fat and building that muscle), but a pound of muscle is denser and has significantly less volume than a pound of fat.  Your weight may stay the same while your body shape is noticeably changing.

(3) Record everything you eat.  With the holidays coming up, this is tedious – heavy family dinners, parties, socials, etc.  This helps you see patterns in your eating and helps you make adjustments to make sure you’re getting enough carbohydrates, fats, and proteins without consistently overdoing any one of these.  I use an app in my phone to keep up with this.

(4) Move.  Grab extra steps whenever and however you can.  Some days require long periods of sitting, but break them up by walking and stretching.

(5) Be gracious with yourself.  You’re not going to exercise when you’re sick.  That’s OK.  There’s no walking outside when it’s 30 degrees.  Ate 2400 calories on that day of the office Christmas party followed by your spouse surprising you with dinner out?  It’s one day. You haven’t failed as long as you get right back to it as soon as you reasonably can.

(6) Eat the dessert.  In other words, don’t do a deprivation diet.  Eating a little bit of that “bad food” will stave off cravings for it and the potential for bingeing on it.  Denying yourself carbs or fats or whatever to lose weight just makes you want those foods that much more after you meet your weight-loss goal.  I have seen, time after time, people regaining unhealthy amounts of weight after following low-carb diets or diets where the foods/meals are provided for them.  Just be sure to record the food in your food journal and possibly add some extra exercise to the week.

I had already cut out sugary drinks (tea and sodas) in favor of water, so that isn’t something new to me.  I also don’t drink many alcoholic drinks (max 2-3 a year) or fancy coffee drinks, all of which pack on a lot of empty calories.  I am still losing weight, but this lifestyle change has become a part of me.  Simply put, the side benefits make me feel good, so I’m more inclined to keep with it.

Once you make a healthy lifestyle yours, it goes beyond such mundane things as dieting for weight loss and trying to bulk up.  With a slow and steady progress, the healthy lifestyle becomes just that – a life style.  Or, a better way to look at it is, a style of living for the rest of your life.  It’s a style of living that includes healthy, balanced eating; regular exercise; and overall choices that lead to a longer, happier, healthier, more active life.

Email as a Productivity Suck

Think Different Wordle
Think Different Wordle (Photo credit: Ian Aberle)

Email.  Love it or hate it, most of us rely on it as a speedy, efficient way to communicate.  I use it for everything from general shared things (links and pictures), to grocery lists, to business matters.  It’s faster than old-fashioned “snail mail” but less invasive than a phone call.  I’m in the habit of checking my primary two email accounts daily, and I used to check them both every morning while sipping my pre-breakfast water.  But an article I read which one of my fellow Indies posted changed that.  (That link is well worth the read.)

As I read this list, even in the midst of our absolutely insane last month, two things resonated with me the most:  #2 – “Don’t check your email first thing in the morning,” and #6 – “Define your goals the night before.”  Wow.  With two events and three large orders, how easy it would be to implement at least those two goals in order to be more productive.  So, the next morning, I denied myself the obsessive urge to check my business email.  I skimmed my Facebook feed, tidied up my Gmail a bit (that’s my social email address), then ate breakfast and read for a few, completely oblivious to what might be in my business inbox.  After breakfast, I showered, then focused on some of the items I needed to get done for my events and customers.  In fact, it wasn’t until early afternoon before I ever got to my email, and nothing needed my attention.  That night before going to bed, I wrote my to-do list out on the dry-erase board and slept soundly, knowing there wasn’t anything that I was forgetting.

The article points out that reading email first thing in the morning makes a person more reactive than proactive.  The day before, my time was my own, focused on my goals and my agenda.  There was nothing I had to deal with that had cropped up, leaving me free to work as I wished.  The second day, I got cocky and checked email in the morning as was my habit.  In amidst the usual notifications and alerts, there was an email from one of my wholesale stockists.  Yes, I read it.  While I didn’t respond to it then, it stayed in the back of my mind until I did deal with it, distracting me from giving my tasks 100% of my focus and attention.  That alone was enough to encourage me to stick with waiting before checking my business email.

It’s been ridiculously easy to liberate myself from looking at my business email first thing in the morning, though I have had to become even more intentional about that since fixing the email app on my phone.  It all comes down to boundaries.  During the day, my time belongs to my girls, my business and myself.  While my customers are certainly the lifeblood of my business, there are many times when my business itself needs to be my focus, when I’ve got to be OK with putting off emails and phone calls until that batch of soap has been put to bed, or while that batch of lip balm is setting up.  There are other days, though, when my lovely customers come at the top of my day, and I can push other things to afterwards.

The to-do list has been a harder discipline, not because I don’t know what to put on one, but because I keep adding to it all day.  During our academic year, I would identify 2-3 key goals for that day, and if I just met those goals for my business, then I could keep things going just fine.  This time of year, that list expands to 6-7 items just for my business, nevermind the plethora of household tasks that demand my attention.  However, my nights are more peaceful and my days more productive when I take 2-3 minutes to create a list before going to bed.

What tips do you have for improving your productivity each day?  Feel free to share for everyone’s benefit!

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