The Renegade Writer Blog

(Back in 2006, Linda wrote a post about health and the freelancer. These odds & ends are a continuation.)

Watch your butt

This is an indelicate subject, but I’m an indelicate person, so here goes.

The more successful you are as a freelancer, the more you sit on your ass. Sitting for hours a day at a keyboard = unhappy heiney. Unhappiness begins with a spreading posterior. You’ll notice as the years pass, your butt cheeks spread. Then, you hit 40 or, if you’re female, pop out a few kids, and whoa, it’s Preparation H time. Combine the spreading-butt phenomenon and the horrendous hemorrhoids with a terrible diet — lots of coffee and diet soda, not enough fruits and fiber — and the butt expansion/hemorrhoidal hell only gets worse.

We writers fuss over our wrists, necks, and lower backs, but it’s the butt that bears the brunt of our profession. Make your butt a health asset:

• Do butt squeezes throughout the day. Not only does this help tighten your glutes (the heiney muscles), it gets blood moving and flowing “down there.”
• Aim to eat 25 to 30 grams of dietary fiber every day. Fiber keeps you “regular,” as grandma used to say. When you’re not regular, you’re constipated, and chronic constipation is one cause of those nasty hemorrhoids. Most Americans don’t get anywhere near this recommended amount of fiber in their diets, due, in part, to a love of processed food. There are so many easy ways to sneak extra fiber in your diet:
  • Look for the breakfast cereals out there that have anywhere from 5 to 9 grams of fiber in every serving (preferably cereals that don’t have a lot of sugar and/or artificial sweeteners).
  • Eat raspberries: One-half cup contains a whopping 20 grams of fiber!
  • Include a huge, vegetable-rich salad every day for lunch, and sprinkle it with wheat bran or ground flaxseeds.
  • If you can’t get all your fiber requirements from diet alone, then look to supplements. The Vitamin Shoppe makes a product called Miracle Fiber that I really like. It’s inulin, a natural vegetable fiber, that dissolves completely and flavorlessly into any beverage. A teaspoon has 5 grams of fiber. I add it to my tea and water to boost my fiber intake. I even sneak it into my kid’s hot cocoa.

Aren’t you glad you asked? Ooops, you didn’t.

Play with your diet

When I worked in a cubicle, I used to read a lot of diet books. Not just books to help me lose weight (God knows all those trips to the vending machines took their toll!), but books about vegetarianism and general health improvement. Most of these books required a new way of eating and thinking about food. They also required a lot of time to shop, prepare food, and cook. Or the plan would require me to eat at certain times of the day — and those times were usually when I was trying to get a package out the door to Fed Ex or was suffering through a boooooring meeting.

Maybe you’ve been thinking about going vegan. Or you’d like to cut sugar or caffeine out of your diet. If you’re freelancing, you have the perfect job, the ideal setting, to make these kind of dietary changes (changes to your exercise habits, too!). You have flexibility to plan your schedule. You have no boss who’s going to raise her right eyebrow if you need to chop vegetables at 10:30 a.m. Moreover, sometimes dietary changes make you cranky. I remember giving up caffeine when I worked in an office job. It was horrible. I was snappy, my head hurt, but I still had to perform at 100 percent. If you’re doing this at home, though, you can take it easy for a few days, maybe even sneak in a couple naps. Then there are some of the unpleasant side effects some dietary changes create. Think about what happens when you increase your fiber intake or start eating more legumes. It’s really nice not having to share this part of a new diet with co-workers. (Cats and dogs don’t seem to mind strange noises and smells.)

Set up an HSA

A lot of self-employed folks think HSAs, or health savings accounts, are bennies for those who work for an employer. Not so. You can easily set up your own HSA. (An HSA is tax-exempt money you set aside in an account to pay for things like doctor’s visits, insurance deductibles, prescriptions, eyeglasses — even stuff like sunscreen and massages!) Last week someone on a writers’ board I belonged to posted about a company that offers no-fee HSAs for consumers. I haven’t set one up through them, fwiw, but it looks promising.  [db]

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