Category: Self-Improvement

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What Do You Like?

I actually used the weight room rather than do body weight stuff today.

For all that I’m in favor of body weight exercises and really think that there are dozens of paths to fitness, I gotta say I like freeweights better.   Oh yes, body weight exercises travel well, what with only needing about six feet of floor and no equipment.  But having that bar across your shoulders is cool.  Well, it’s cool to me.

That’s important.  What do you like to do?

I think that in our chasing fitness (or sometimes just waving cheerfully from our chairs and getting on with our blogging), we get too into the perfect workout, or what we thinking we “should” be doing.

If you’ve decided being more active is important to you, finding something that makes you feel good is important.  I don’t swim and use free weights because they’re The Ultimate Exercise.  I swim and use free weights because that’s what I’ll do.  Sure, sure, I can come up with a million reasons why I’m Right to Do What I Do in terms of great exercise and Why People Who Do It Different Are Wrong. But,  I have a friend who hates exercise for the sake of exercise.  Oh, she’ll paddle twenty miles in a kayak.  Show her a mountain and she’ll hike on up it chattering cheerfully all the way.  Don’t try to put her in a gym.  She’d be miserable.  And I’m sure if it were her way, she could come up with a million reasons why she is Right to Do What She Does and Why People Who Do It Differently Are Wrong.

Both of us would be wrong, too.

So, if you’re into being active, what do you like?

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Whose Job is the Housework?

“The guys just don’t feel the same way we do about the house. They don’t have the guilt that eats away at them.” Flylady in an answer to a letter about the Husband’s clutter.

Oh boy…

Here’s the problem.  Do you know why men don’t feel guilty if the house looks like shit?  It’s because quite often they feel it’s the woman’s job to clean the house.  You can’t feel guilty about something you feel isn’t your responsibility!

Now, as it happens, I am the one who takes charge of how the house looks.  There are several reasons, and yes, one of the reasons is that I’m the one who cares the most about it and I’ve made some life choices that give me the time.  But you know what?  If I had something else I was doing that I considered important[1], I would consider that the important thing to do.  I will, have and do react incredibly badly to the automatic assumption that having a uterus means that I’m the one who should automagically be in charge of how the house looks.  Lack of help cleaning up after dinner would have me quite disinclined to cook another single meal.   I haven’t the slightest problem with asking people to pick up after themselves, and consistent refusal to do so is definitely a relationship-killer with me.

But the guilt thing?  Friends, that’s some sexist socialization there.  Partnerships and equitability are one thing, but you wouldn’t establish a business partnership with the relationship  and responsibilities unexamined.  Why shoot yourself in the foot with your life partners?

[1] A book deadline, for instance, would mean that instead of me doing the lion’s share of the household chores, we’d be splitting housework up in thirds Or There Would Be Serious Trouble.

 

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Drinking the FlyLady Kool-Aid

I think I’m developing a bit of a split personality about having drunk the Flylady Kool-aid.

On the one hand, I really do like the system quite a bit.   Between the routines, the decluttering and the missions I get in the email, the house looks nice and runs smoothly.  Anyone could walk in right at this second and I would not be embarrassed about how the house looks.

On the other hand, I’m tired of reading testimonials about how a product has changed someone’s life on a site about decluttering.  I’m sorry, but “buy more stuff” is seldom a good solution to a clutter problem, especially when clutter and hoarding problems are usually related to problems with shopping too much in the first place!

On the other hand (yes, I know, three hands.  When do I ever follow a system without adding my own twist?  Get over it)  I’m all for people creating successful small businesses.  I do have a bit of a squick at the idea that she’s selling stuff to people with clutter problems, but only a small one. I mean, the woman sells cleaning cloths, for heaven’s sake.  I might have made my own out of old towels rather than bought some, but it’s a reusable product that’s genuinely useful.

I certainly don’t tell my family Flylady loves us and wants us to have a clean house.  (Yes, some of the testimonials posts have mothers saying that they’ve said this to their children.  I find that creepy as hell). I don’t don’t follow the system exactly.  I am wearing slippers, not shoes. I don’t “bless the house”.  I dust and vacuum.  I don’t put in 15 minutes of “loving movement”.  I work out!  I certainly don’t have some picture of a Cheerful Fairy with a fishing rod and tennis shoes shaking her finger at me on some household appliance.   I look at my schedule and think, “Yep, I need to empty the dishwasher.”

Certainly if all twee nonsense works, it works.  If you need all that to get organized enough to suit yourself, you need it.  I sympathize with needing tools.  My mother, for instance, does not need a notebook or a schedule to keep the house clean. She just does it.  She doesn’t need a battle plan for something as simple and obvious as housekeeping.

And that’s where I get really weirded out.  People will write the author of the Flylady site to argue with her about her system.

Why why why?

You don’t wanna wear shoes in the house, don’t.  If your life wasn’t changed by buying a feather duster, that’s just fine.  If you like spending one day a week cleaning the house from top to bottom rather than using routines, that’s your call.  If you don’t want to worry about having a clean house at all, whose damn life is it, anyway?

You don’t need Flylady’s permission.

Though, I am unsubbing from the list because I’ve got what works for me, and I’m not that into reading commercials.

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Flying Solo

I’ve been teaching my son to cook.  Tonight he made dinner by himself from a recipe, though he did have a bit of an issue with converting the rice recipe to more servings.

Still, the meal came out tasty.

But that’s not the story I wanted to tell.

See, I’ve been doing the Flylady system for awhile in my house.  Decluttering, Zone work, routines — all that smack.  It sounds goofy, but the house looks nice, so laugh all you want.

What’s even goofier is that I have a notebook for my household routines.  It’s a checklist of chores that need to happen every morning, early evening and before bed, as well as any zone work that needs to happen.  It’s a printout of a checklist in plastic sheet protectors, so I can just use dry-erase markers to check ’em off and wipe ’em off for the next day.  Laugh it up, but at least this means I get to detailed cleaning in each room.  I’m not naturally neat, and can ignore a pig sty for a long time (just ask my mother what it was like to raise me), so anything that works is really nothing short of a miracle.

I have it for myself, to keep me on track, but it’s on the counter in the kitchen because it also has the menu plan and the recipe book I’d written as a teaching tool for my son.

Tonight, the man of the house was cleaning up after dinner, and actually went through that checklist, sweeping the floor and things I don’t think are mentally part of washing the dishes in his eyes.

I hadn’t asked him to.  In fact, I’d assumed he hadn’t, didn’t look and just went to sweep the floor when he asked me if I’d looked at the checklist.  Since I do have the notebook mostly as a self-reminder, I didn’t give it a lot of thought.  Most of the kitchen cleanup had been done.  I just made coffee for tomorrow.

No, I don’t think a control journal (that’s what Flylady calls the household notebook), is going to make the household magic, and everyone will decide to be as concerned with keeping the house clean as the DCF.  It won’t.

And it doesn’t need to.

What is cool about it for my household is that it gives clear and rather impersonal guidelines for keeping the house clean and picked up.  Instead of a person constantly reminding, there’s this list that stays there all the time. Yeah, I know I wrote it.  That’s not the point.  It’s that what needs to be done and what gets done become impersonally clear at all times.

Now I’m lucky.  I live in a household of people that like to contribute.  I can’t imagine that if it were a household where people were upset with each other and didn’t mutually care about the condition of the home, nor mutually contributing to the pleasantness of the household that a control journal would do a damn bit of good.  So no, it’s not the magic a lot of Flylady testimonials like to put out there.

But it is a good tool.

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Not Just Fifteen Minutes

I got bored yesterday and did something impossibly geeky.  I timed myself doing every single task on my Flylady routine.  Including cooking and making bento, it came to about ten minutes under two hours.  (Take away the cooking and bento and you’re looking at 1:16:10)

Now, in Real Life, I don’t do every chore myself.   That fifteen minutes it takes to do the evening routine is generally cut in half because the whole household helps clean up after dinner, set up the coffee pot for the next day and all that.  Call eight minutes at the outside.  I don’t clean every bathroom in the house, nor do I generally fold the laundry or take out the trash.

So the idea that you can keep your house clean in fifteen minutes a day is a little inaccurate.   It’d be fair to say I spend about an hour and a half, if I include meal preparation.

But it’s not like I spend that whole hour at once.  The routines really do average out to just under fifteen minutes for each of them.

What I don’t do:

Make the bed perfectly.  Good lord, what a waste of time.  Spread it up, toss the pillow shams at the head, you’re good.

Spend hours cleaning the bathroom.   Swish-n-swipe daily.  Hit it once a month with some serious detail cleaning over a week.  Good enough.

Let things pile up.  This is the biggie.  I hate to do things right away, I really do.  The problem is, if things do pile up, I’m less likely to touch them.  It gets overwhelming.  But dusting around piles, or trying to vacuum around stacks?  Who does that?  That’s too much to deal with!

Let the dishes sit overnight.  If I do that, the kitchen will look like a bomb went off in it inside of a week.

I try to obey the thirty second rule.  Basically, if it takes less than thirty seconds, do it right away.  The thing I’m worst about for this is coming home from a long day teaching, and I’m tired.  I often don’t put my materials away right away.  If I have more than one class in the week, this means by the end of the week I’ll have a pile of materials that have become part of the background.  They don’t jump out at me any more, so it may be another week before they’re put away.  This includes things like letting mail I need to deal with piled up “for later”, dropping my gym bag in the corner when I come back tired from a workout, instead of emptying the damn thing and throwing stinky towels in the wash and hanging up a wet bathing suit.  If I do it right away, the house stays clean.  If I don’t, oh my word, the clutter plies.

Is my house “perfect”?  God no!  There’s cat hair on the sofa, the shelves in the kitchen cabinets could do with a good wash,  I can see dust on the piano, there’s a catnip mousie in the middle of the living room floor, the entryway could use a mopping, and the floor of my bedroom closet,would cause me my mother to use the express “rat’s nest”.   Since I do Flylady, I have routines to take care of all those things in the proper time.  She breaks the house into zones for detailed cleaning.  I’ll get to the cathair when we’re in the living room zone, I’ll spend some times on the shelves when we get to the kitchen, I’ll dust tomorrow (I dust on Mondays), I’ll pick up the mousie the next time I get up to go to the bathroom (and drop my coffee cup into the dishwasher along the way), the entryway floor will get mopped when we’re in the zone to do that, and I’ll be spending fifteen minutes a day decluttering the bottom of my closet when we’re in the zone to work on that.

I’ll feel free to follow the maintenance schedule because clutter’s picked up and I don’t feel all stressed about it.  I don’t feel guilty that these things are dirty, either.  Things need to be attended to and a maintenance schedule works just fine.

But, keeping the house clean isn’t about going for that perfect look.  When you keep the house orderly, you rarely get that “OMG, I’ve worked so hard and now the house is all clean and shiny” feeling.   What I do have is a house that doesn’t embarrass me if someone drops by.

And yes, my sink is shiny.

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The Power of Fifteen Minutes

One of my favorite working tools is actually an iPod.  No, it’s not that I like to listen to music or an audiobook while I’m doing something (thought I do), but that it has a sleep timer.  It has intervals from fifteen to one hundred twenty minutes, though I only use the fifteen minute option.

I love that thing.  I love it because I’m a busy woman.  I have a lot going on – I’m self-employed, have a part-time job, have a household with people going in and out, and a schedule that’s always changing.

There are times when I look at a task and I feel overwhelmed with it.  At those times, it’s really hard to get myself going.  I am a champion procrastinator.  Remember that self-employed bit?  I can only procrastinate so much before I’m procrastinating my son out of food[1].

That’s when the timer comes in.  You’d be amazed at how much you can get done in fifteen minutes of focus.  Now while I got the idea from Flylady[2], I don’t only use it for housework.  I use the idea to work.  When I’m feeling daunted, I just set my timer for fifteen minutes and work.  That sounds goofy, trivial and dumb, but there’s many a project I’ve gotten done fifteen minutes at a time.  The time sounds like such a small amount, I know.  That’s the beauty of it.  You can force yourself to do almost anything for fifteen mintues.  If you do that a few times a day, you’re actually accomplishing a great deal.   Things often don’t take as much time as we think they will when we focu—

Ah, music stopped.  Break’s over and I have to get back to work.  For those of you writers who go for word count, I’d written 320 words before the music went off.  Now imagine four or five sessions of fifteen minutes while writing.  That’s an adequate word count for a day’s work, innit?

[1] And I have a teenaged boy with a teenaged appetite.  Oy!

 

[2] To be honest, except for cooking dinner, no one task ever takes a whole fifteen minutes.

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I Have Come to a Decision

I’ve been reviewing my work Screw Skinny, Get Fit and I realize that I’ve been messing around on this project for too long.  I need a big, huge deadline that’ll embarrass me if I don’t meet it to get my lazy butt in gear about this thing.

So, here’s the deal.

I’m going to be offering ScrewSkinny for sale in PDF or PRC (that means you can read it on a Kindle, or in Mobipocket) starting April 1, 2010.   I  haven’t set a price yet, but it’s going to be under $10.  If I get another big contract, I’m just gonna have to give up some knitting time.  This is gonna happen no matter who else wants my literary excellence.

This book is not for the athlete.  It’s for someone who is sedentary who wants to build or maintain health and fitness.  If you have an active, outdoor lifestyle, you’re all good and don’t need this.  It’s for someone who’d rather knit or play WoW.  Yes, there is a strong geek focus.

I discuss levels of ability, including handicaps of various sorts, and explain why The Perfect Workout is nonsense.

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The New Fat Chick in the Gym

Hey, you gym bunnies?  I have a heads up for ya.  Some day you may wind up seeing a fat chick in the gym.  No, really.  I know that the media says we don’t exercise (because exercise magically melts the pounds away the second you step on a treadmill, dontchaknow?), but some of us do.

Now many of you are thinking, “Oh hey, cool.  She’s decided to work out.  That’s great!”

You know, you’re right.  Choosing to be active is a great health choice in many cases.  That’s why we do it, right?

Since chances are good that you prefer to be benevolent and supportive, I’d like to offer a few little tips.

  • Unless you know her really, really well, don’t say “I’m proud of you” the second you see her in the gym.

    • Yes, there are people who need the strokes and the hand-holding. Do you know that person well enough to know if she needs it? Be sure before you say something like that. The whole “I’m proud of you” thing can come off just awfully condescending from a stranger, even if your intention is to be benevolent.  When she’s done her first pullup, though, feel free to throw confetti and blow horns.

  • Be aware that body consciousness exists.

    • It may be the custom to parade around in the altogether in your locker room, regardless of age or body type. (It is in my gym!) However, it might take awhile before any new person (fat or not!) is necessarily comfortable with chatting with someone they don’t know well totally naked.

  • Unless asked, don’t monitor her progress.

    • Again, I know people like to be supportive of positive life choices, and that’s cool. There’s a difference between having someone be supportive and finding that someone has tried to make a project out of you.  The latter is a real pain in the butt.

  • Do be inclusive.

    • While I’m sure you know the rule about not bothering someone in the gym with headphones in, if she’s not wearing them, being friendly is good. You and I know that all it takes to be a member of the Cool Kids Club in a gym is showing up, but it’s not common knowledge among the uninitiated. Let ’em know they belong.

  • Don’t make assumptions about her fitness goals

    • She might be trying to take fat off. She might be working on her strength and not bothering with body fat percentage. She might be rehabbing an injury. Unless you know what her fitness goals are, your advice is probably useless. Wait to be asked.

Do I blame social gaffes on chasing someone away from the gym? Not entirely. If you really aren’t into being there, you’ll probably find just about any reason not to.   Still, if you want to make sure your gym is a welcoming, inclusive place, it’s a good idea just to be matter of fact about people being there rather than making a big deal of any one particular class of person showing up.

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Dumb Choices

I’ve ranted about this before, though I forget where.

There’s a new marketing campaign to sell more crap manufactured food called Smart Choices.

There’s been some discussion on various forums involving health, fitness and eating where one idea came up that boggled me.  A parent was expressing the idea that it’s hard to combat the marketing techniques with the children.

You have got to be kidding me.

You control what goes in the grocery cart.    You control what you pay for.  Yes, little Knucklehead might roll around on the floor screaming and crying for his treasured Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs.   No, the glares awarding you the Crappy Parent of the Year award from other grocery store patrons isn’t much fun when you don’t placate the child to make him shut up so they can go back to shopping in peace.   I get that.  I’m a parent.  Been there, done that.  Dragging a kid along the floor who has gone Gandhi in protest isn’t fun.

Thing is, little Knucklehead probably isn’t that dumb.  Screaming hurts one’s throat and cold grocery store floors aren’t really all that much fun to lie on.  If you keep saying no consistently, they’ll get the point.

If you can’t handle enforcing a no when it comes to cereal and you’re the one with the checkbook, I don’t even want to think of what it’s going to look like when your kids are teenagers.

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Don't Waste Valuable Butt-Scratching Time

Technically what I really should be doing as far as workouts it swimming three days a week and doing a full-body weights workout twice a week.

I, uhhh… Well, I haven’t been doing that.

I don’t think I’ve ever dropped below two workouts (usually a 1000-1500 yard swim) a week, but I have a sedentary job, no yard to take care of that needs yardwork and sedentary hobbies.   Two workouts a week with that lifestyle isn’t really enough to stay healthy and strong, and I know it.  If I had a dog I was walking every day, or was doing something where I was walking the equivalent of a couple of miles a day, it’d be different.

However, with my lifestyle, a good solid workout every weekday is pretty necessary.

With that in mind, I hauled my complaining butt into the weight room today (swam yesterday) and decided that since I’ve been a slacker, I was going to drop back to embarassingly light weights just to make sure I did the darn workout.  You know, Rule One and all.

I was weaker than I thought.  That wimp workout was a challenge!

Ah well.  I’ll do the wimp workout again on Thursday, and then next week do it again.  Then I’ll be a little stronger and can add a little more.  I wish I loved working out.  I mean, it’s okay when I’m in the weight room and all, but I’d rather stay in a warm bed, I really would.

I actually found it hard to hit the weight room today — afraid of being judged or made unwelcome.  That was goofy and there was no excuse for it.  I knew the people in there. I see them several times a week.  None of ’em have ever been mean to me, so there was no reason in the world to think they would do so because I was working out instead of working behind a desk!   If they’re going back to their blogs or weight lifting discussion boards and making fun of how the fat chick looks at the squat rack, I certainly don’t see it.  But they don’t behave as if they’re into that level of petty nastiness in the gym, so I’ve no evidence to think they would.

It got me to thinking.  Sure there’s a lot of nastiness about appearance out there, no doubt.  But it seems a bit unkind to brace oneself for it when one hasn’t any evidence that it’s likely to happen.   Now, I got picked on in school, so I know what it’s like to cultivate the appearance of deafness, but be braced inside for nasty comments.  I know the inward flinch, the way you script in your own mind for a good comeback.  Which, of course, you never remember to use when the situation happens, anyway.   That mental bracing is a waste of valuable butt-scratching time when you think about it.  You’d be much better employed learning to fart the Jaws theme rather than spend precious mental energy on it.

And in my case, thinking about my form when the bar is loaded across my shoulders is a lot better use of mental energy than worrying about how I look to others.  I mean, if I look around to see if I’m being judged, I’m more likely to fall and hurt myself.   Forget that!