On Losing Weight and Writing Books

 It hit me yesterday how many similarities there are between losing weight and writing books. I’m sure there are even more dissimilarities, but it is the similarities that interest me. If you have a lot of weight to lose and a book to write, both will be long struggles with lots of ups and downs.

There will be days where you feel everything is hopeless, gaining weight when you should be losing it, and erasing words when you should be writing them. You will cheat and eat ice cream while you enjoy someone else’s written words instead of creating your own. And there will be the good days where you can see and feel the weight you’ve lost, where eating healthy and exercising make you feel liberated and good about yourself. Where the words flow and you’re convinced you’re writing Nobel Prize worthy material. Maybe you have training partners and pre-readers. Maybe you’re alone on your journey toward being skinny and published. But whatever path you take, it’s paramount that you make it your own. You cannot lose weight or write a book using someone else’s recipe.

There is a good chance you will have tried either losing weight or writing a book before. Perhaps even both. There is also a good chance that you didn’t succeed, because let’s face it, that’s how it often goes. What you did succeed in, however, was dreaming up how amazing it would be once you’d lost that weight and published that book. You could taste it, picture it in your mind, and you had already started planning which clothes to buy and how to sign your autograph in all those books you were going to sell. And then life happened. Something got in the way, and you never finished.

It is a journey. Weight loss or book writing. And until you’re one hundred percent ready to make that journey, you will never reach the destination. Happy traveling and good luck.