Atkins, Eat Your Heart Out

I may have picked a bad time to go on a diet.

With NaNoWriMo coming, it's normally hard to think about anything else.  Between the excitement that comes with breaking ground on a new story and the anxiety that comes with making daily wordcounts, there really isn't much room left.

That is, of course, unless you've just started a new job and are working towards buying your first house.

So I decided that now would be a good time to go on a diet.  You know, just to keep things interesting.

Setting aside for a moment the rapid eroding effect stress has on gustatory discipline, now is really not the time to be splitting my focus yet one more way.  If I were a Pokemon, I would have had to lose at least one basic ability by now.

I'm guessing "Rest."

Honestly, the stress of house-buying alone is enough to make anyone consider surfing face-first down the buffet line at a Golden Corral.  Thankfully, our move-in date isn't until December, or I'd be bowing out of NaNo this year entirely.  As it is, we just have to do little things like coordinate inspections and pack up the entire house and everything we own.

And how hard can that be?

I'm actually somewhat glad for the house-buying timing:  all the minor fix-ups and prep work we have to undertake this month and next should make for ideal small, offline distractions that I will hate just enough to be chased back to writing before long.  It should allow me to take a break, still do something productive, and then want to return to writing just to take a break.

At least, that's the theory.


So why on earth would I choose now to try and lose weight?  Some would suggest a recent head injury or some form of genetic mental disorder, and they'd be close, but the truth is that NaNoWriMo involves all sort of dieting already, adding food to the list seemed like the next natural step.

Writing 50,000 words in a month with what little time you have already means setting aside other things you would much, much rather be doing.  Some of these are important (seeing your friends, being romantic with a partner or spouse, petting your suddenly overly-insistent cats) while others seem to materialize just to throw temptation in your path (video games, TV reruns, an endless chain of linked Wikipedia entries, the entire archives of a webcomic you only just discovered this month, and so forth).

You're dieting from all these things already, cutting down on amount and frequency without necessarily cutting them out altogether.  You have to content yourself with small portion sizes for your non-writing activities, big or small, to make the best use of the hours you have (which never seem to be quite as many as you thought you would).

So cutting back on fatty and sugar-heavy foods isn't that far out of the way for my personal discipline.  There are also additional gains, at least in theory:  not being over-full means avoiding the sleepy after-meal coma that is only worsened by the steady blink of a cursor at the tail end of your last written sentence.  Not going out for meals means time saved in transit as well as quicker meals and the excuse to get up and so something on your feet (instead of sitting in front of a computer some more).

There is something to be said for change of venue and the break that food provides, which is all the more reason to pick November to diet in.  Several small meals throughout the day have been shown to be healthier three large ones (or, as it is for many of us, two large ones).  Several small meals not only spread out the energy boost from the calories involved, they provide more brief breaks to the routine.

Best of all, toward the end of the month, Americans at least can enjoy Thanksgiving and glut themselves on food galore as a sort of late-game reward for all their dedication thus far, in both their writing and their waistline.  It makes an excellent target to aim for with enough time left before the end of the month for the sort of tidying up we can all expect to need.

That said, there are some things that should never be included in the dieting.  Work, for instance, doesn't take a break for November.  Romance, as well, should not be cut out entirely for risk of ending the month with half a novel and half an empty apartment (unless you're lucky and your partner is also taking on the NaNoWriMo challenge).

It's good to be a lucky man :)

Pets are another exception, but not because a month of reduced affection would risk severing their relationship with something that you feed and clean up after.  Pets, science has shown, are walking, swimming, squirming stress relief.  Cats especially seem enthralled with the writing process, and will not be denied their primal duty to interrupt it whenever possible.

Let them.  Few animals are as calming, as inspiring or as entertaining as a cat; doubly so when invested in making their presence felt (driven by the impetus of being ignored in favor of blinking text on a screen).
Besides, many writers already know that cats are a warm and fuzzy reminder of a hard and chilling truth:

If you can't type from under the purring lump of a sleeping cat, it might be time to consider another hobby.