Four weeks

RWA '12 is just four weeks away now...and this was NOT a good week with respect to progress toward my health/fitness and writing goals.

You see, I got derailed by a health issue. I can't even call it a health scare, because the odds of it being anything particularly dire are quite small. I'll spare you the gory details, but suffice it to say I saw my doctor, she was able to give me some short-term help, and she's referred me to a specialist, whom I'll see tomorrow. There are good treatment options, and I've got reason to hope the simplest and least invasive of them will actually work for me.

This shouldn't have derailed me as much as it did.  At the worst of it, I was in enough discomfort that I had a reasonable excuse for skipping aerobics, but it wasn't bad enough to justify the potato chips or the extra sodas or the three days of not writing. I was never sick as such, just uncomfortable, and thanks to my internet research (yes, I self-diagnose via Google), I knew even before seeing the doctor that this was almost certainly nothing to be afraid of.  My only excuse is that the whole thing pulled my focus and wrecked my rhythm.

Planning and journaling my food was the first thing to go, and still hasn't come back. Writing came back more quickly, partly because I like writing a whole lot more than I do carefully planning and controlling my food intake, and partly because the consequences of not writing are a lot clearer: If I stop writing, I'll never sell another book. Period. End of my stories.

The food thing? Well, sure, it increases my risk of various conditions that might eventually kill me, but it's not like eating a perfect diet from this day forward guarantees I'll never have a stroke or a heart attack or develop type II diabetes or colon cancer. Genetics are at least as powerful as lifestyle. And it's not like I'm going to drop 2-3 dress sizes and reach goal weight in time for this year's RWA anyway. 2013 or 2014, maybe.

Ordinarily this is where I give up, drop the program, and eat whatever and whenever I want for another few months. But this time I mean to dust myself off and try again, not least because I've committed myself to blogging about it every Sunday between now and RWA. It's just a setback. They happen. Just because the health thing never had me spiking a fever or fearing some dreadful diagnosis doesn't mean it wasn't legitimately stressful. If nothing else, it was one more thing I had to spend energy concentrating on, and it's not like my everyday life isn't packed already.