Good news from the scale and from book-land

LATEST STATS: To November 27, 2012

Amount lost: 33.5 lbs

How long it’s taken me so far (June 20 to Nov. 20): 5 months

Someone said to me last night, on hearing my total weight loss so far and how long I’ve been sticking to my resolution not to eat sugar, “Now you’ll have to rewrite The Whole Clove Diet.”

The whole point is that I DON’T have to rewrite The Whole Clove Diet, because what I am doing is proof of the (sugarless 🙂 ) pudding.

Over the course of the novel, Rita learns about the basic and fundamental adjustments in attitude that she needs to make in order to change her compulsive way of eating, and I (knowing those principles from other kinds of overindulgence I have indulged in in my life — I am the one, after all, who wrote the novel!) got it together enough to put those principles to work in the food-consumption area of my life. That’s all.

My weight loss has slowed in the past couple of months because I have been extraordinarily busy with freelance editing work (several full books, a master’s thesis, a PhD thesis, a monograph, not to mention several shorter pieces of fiction and technical articles) and for that and various other reasons, I have  been eating out more than usual. So I’ve had more refined starches than I had earlier in my sugar-free journey – potatoes, rice, and bread. But I continue to avoid sugar, and I continue to watch portions, and I continue to lose weight.

I keep thinking, “I haven’t weighed myself for a week or ten days. I’ve been eating out and I’ve been eating well. I’ll bet I’ve gained.” But each time I check, I’ve lost.

My favourite weight-loss concept, which I acknowledge with great pleasure having borrowed from one of my favourite books about health and life (Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever, by Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman. I’ve been reading it over and over, along with their newer book, Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever, for years)  is this: If you choose the number  of calories that you SHOULD be eating if you were the weight you SHOULD be at, and then just eat that number of calories every day, you will get to that weight eventually. It’s inevitable.

I have pretty much been doing that, even though I don’t count calories: I’ve been eating the way I would eat to maintain my weight if I were at my goal weight (which is still another 15 to 20 lbs away). The thing I love about this is that means I am “impersonating myself” at my goal weight: at least in my food intake, if not in my dress size and muscle tone yet. 🙂 Rita gets some pleasure when she discovers this principle too. It’s sort of like training for living at the size I want to be.

NEWS on The Whole Clove Diet front

This week I am honoured to be the Book of the Week on the B.R.A.G. (Book Lovers Appreciation Group) “Indie Brag” site, and although I didn’t win in the Writers Digest Self-Published Books award competition, I did get a fabulous review from them, which I will post here soon. In the meantime, an excerpt:

“These very-real details are wonderfully portrayed [in The Whole Clove Diet] with language which is vivid, humorous and intelligent. And some of the sentences are poetry.”

Okay. Enough crowing and self-indulgence. Back to my editing work!

B.R.A.G. Medallion for The Whole Clove Diet

I am very pleased to announce that The Whole Clove Diet has been honoured with a Book Readers Appreciation Group (B.R.A.G.) Medallion.

The Book Readers Appreciation Group mission is “to recognize quality on the part of authors who self-publish both print and digital books.”

From their website:

BRAGMedallion.com is owned and operated by indieBRAG, LLC, a privately held organization that has brought together a large group of readers, both individuals and members of book clubs, located throughout the United States, Canada, and the European Union. The word “indie” refers to self or independently published books, while B.R.A.G. is an acronym for Book Readers Appreciation Group. By their nature, our readers are passionate about all books, but for the purposes of the service we provide, we focus exclusively on the work of self-published authors of print and digital books.

Our mission is to recognize quality on the part of authors who self-publish both print and digital books. As such, we are constantly on the lookout for the work of talented men and women who have written indie books across a wide range of genres. Our primary focus is fiction, however, we selectively consider non-fiction books as well.

From the large and rapidly growing library of indie books that are available today, we select those that we believe deserve to be considered. These books are then read and evaluated by members drawn from our reader group. The readers judge the merits of the books based on our proprietary list of criteria. The single most important criterion that we ask our readers to use in judging a book is whether or not they would recommend it to their best friend. Once a book meets this standard of quality, we award it our B.R.A.G. Medallion™, and along with other medallion recipients, it is presented on this website.

It is also interesting to read the group’s explanation of “Why We Exist.”

There are increasing numbers of individuals and companies that have begun to see the financial possibilities of endorsing some self-published books in an attempt to help readers sort the wheat from the chaff among the millions of tomes that are now available in both print and e-format. For only $500 or so, for example, you can get Kirkus Reviews or Publishers’ Weekly to read your self-published book and, if they like it, you can publish their review on your website. (I did not do that, by the way. I received my Publishers’ Weekly review as part of the process of reaching the top 100 in the first Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards competition.) Other outlets are also springing up that are offering, for a fee, to give your self-published book a rubber stamp that will advise readers it has been edited and looks professional.

It is really nice to see that there is a group of people who love books enough to perform this service without charging the author anything.

It is even nicer to have been the recipient of one of their awards. Thank you, indieBRAG LLC!

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Notes:

• You can follow indieBRAG on FaceBook and Twitter.
• Books can be nominated by anyone for a B.R.A.G. Medallion, but nominators have no influence on the outcome of the evaluation process.