ADD & Me: How I Focus, Write, AND Exercise

For all you writers wondering how to get in exercise to avoid the spread that hours of sitting at a computer can bring (also called Writer's Butt), here's the best thing I've found for me. It may be useful for you, too.

Some history: About a year ago, at the end of 2013, I posted about my ADHD-I, and how it has grown worse and worse with age, making it hard (if not impossible) to be productive and keep my life in balance.

In the last year, I've come a long way. I did get onto medication, which has made a world of difference. It's not that I can't get distracted (I still can, and I am, often), or that I've stopped using coping tools (I rely on them like oxygen). But for me, medication has been one more tool that's helped me immensely.

You may recall that I did just fine in high school and college. I did really well, in fact. And that's one reason that diagnosing me took so long. I have a lot of theories as to why I was able to do well, but among them is the fact that I could hyper-focus to the exclusion of all else. I might have forgotten the pot of water on the stove until it's boiled dry and ruined, but by golly, check out the paper I just wrote. But the ability to hyper-focus faded with age, and that became a huge problem for me as a writer.

The more I've researched ADHD and ADHD-I, the more tools I've learned, and the more I've experimented. I'd seen in my ADHD-I son that movement helped him focus. Sometimes that meant drawing circles, over and over, in a corner of a notebook during a lecture. Other times, when he could  move more, he'd puzzle out a math problem at home by pacing.

So I decided to experiment with whether I could focus better at the computer while walking. The experiment required a tread-desk of some sort. Even the cheapest ones out there are at least $600--not an amount I have just lying around. But we do have a treadmill. So I decided to search Pinterest, and I found a set-up another writer created for her treadmill. If memory serves, in her case, it was just to get in some exercise and be less sedentary. For me, if it worked, it could be a game changer.

I read up on her treadmill attachment and headed over to Home Depot, where I spent $12.42. Here's what I bought: a ready-made shelf (about $7), foam pipe insulation (about $3), and some hardware, which I didn't end up actually using (not pictured).

In the photo below, you'll note a full length of pipe insulation and then two smaller pieces of the same insulation, cut up, which have been used a lot over the last few months. Below them are my husband's wood clamps, which we already had, and which I'll get to in a second.  

The original concept had dryer clamps screwed onto both sides of the shelf. The shelf then rested over the arms of the treadmill, sitting on the insulation pipe, which had been cut in half and protected the arms. Then the dyer clamps were tightened around the treadmill arms and screwed tight.

I opted for a slightly different method, but one which works wonderfully anyway. I needed something that was easily removable, so that any time other family members (or I) want to use the treadmill for an actual workout, we can. And as for easily removable, screws, well, aren't.

I will probably find something a tad smaller to use down the road, but for now, I'm borrowing those two wood clamps from my husband's tools in the garage.

The only insulation I could find had a pretty narrow diameter, so I settled on what I could get. I cut one length of insulation in half and then sliced each piece down the middle so it opened up and can hug the treadmill arm. See the cut (and now flattened) pieces in the picture above.

The next step was simply putting it all together: insulation pieces on the treadmill's arms for protection, balancing the shelf on top, and putting the clamps on to hold the shelf in place.

Here's what it looks like:

And a closer look:

Putting it together takes maybe sixty seconds. Taking it off even less time, if the shelf is empty, more if I have to remove my laptop, notebook, water bottle, etc.

Seriously, it couldn't be easier to set up and take down.

I've had the setup since October. Family members often do take it down to workout. And one of my daughters (who also has ADHD-I) often uses it after school while doing homework or even just reading a book. It helps her focus too.

I get a ton more done while walking and working and the same time (I find that 1.5 to 1.7 mph is optimal for me), and on days I use it, I easily get in my 10,000 steps with my FitBit. In fact, tread-desk days are typically around 13,000 steps, often many more. And I've hit my FitBit record for a day  on it with 28,300 steps.

Unexpected bonus #1:
If I've used the tread desk in the morning, I can focus OFF it longer that afternoon than I could before I had it. So on days when my feet or hips or knees get tired, I can move my laptop to the table beside the treadmill and keep working, and I know that chances are, I'll still be able to focus.

Unexpected bonus #2: 
Moving for literally hours a day has helped me stave off a lot of depression, anxiety, and even panic attacks. My moods are more even, and I manage stress better. I'm not cured by any means, but I'm doing much better on the mental-health front.

Unexpected bonus #3: 
I get many of the benefits of exercise without triggering heinous migraines. Granted, I still have chronic migraines. That hasn't changed. But for years, I'd battled with two realities: Exercise relieves stress and releases endorphins, two things that help my headaches. But if I get my heart rate up with a regular workout, there's a very good chance I'll overheat and click over into hideous pain. And there's no telling which workouts will do it and which won't. The very same workout would be fine one day but would trigger something awful the next. Now, with my tread-desk setup, I'm not at risk of overheating, yet I'm still getting regular exercise. Huzzah!

So there's my solution to several problems. If you're a writer struggling with the typical writer's sedentary lifestyle, maybe you can create your own tread desk too. 

It's been a lifesaver for me!

16 Months: My Transformation

While I usually talk about writing and books and word nerdiness here, this post is going to be a bit different. I'm hoping it will be of some benefit to others in their journeys.

A photo that amazing photographer Erin Summerill took of me at the recent LDStorymakers annual conference inspired me to put this post together. Even with my goofy facial expression and hand waving (I can't teach without using my hands), I've got great before and after pictures.

The really short version: 
For some unknown (then) reason, I got fat, sank into a horrid depression, and otherwise was miserable. Now I'm, well, not all that. The end. Oh, and this is what I looked like. The picture was taken at the 2010 UVU Book Academy conference. I may have gained a few pounds more in the following three months.








The longer version:
For most of my adult life, not counting pregnancies, my has weight stayed in about a seven-pound range. Ideally, I would have liked to have been around 10 lbs lighter and at my marriage weight, but I was at a healthy weight and felt decent about myself.

Then, a few years ago, the pounds began creeping on. I wasn't doing anything different in my life, as far as I could tell. Okay, I could have exercised more than I was (although I didn't stop altogether). And sure, I ate chocolate here and there. But that wasn't a change. Nothing significant had changed in my lifestyle.

But hey, I knew how to lose weight, right? I began watching my diet carefully, cutting here and there and eating much healthier. I exercised more.

Result: More weight gain. The scale just crept up and up. I'll clarify here that my weight gain wasn't in the realm of anything you'd see on The Biggest Loser, but it was still way more than was healthy, and I hated feeling like a beached whale. I hated not fitting into my biggest clothes and having to go to the thrift store to find stuff to wear. I rarely wore anything that didn't stretch.

At first I was in denial. Sure, the scale was up, but I didn't look that bad . . . right? I inherited my mother's frame, so I really can carry a little extra weight without it showing up. When my chocolate cookbook first came out, I had people asking how I could write it and stay so thin. That was before the weight gain. So when those comments stopped altogether, I had a clue what it meant. I was fat. I cringed at every photo of me. My usable wardrobe shrank and shrank.

I started to suspect I had a thyroid problem, but I didn't want to be one of those people making excuses for being fat. ("Oh, it's glandular . . .") I brought it up to my doctor, who ran a blood panel. My TSH and T4 were normal, so I was told not to worry about it; I wasn't hypothyroid.

But the results didn't sit right with me. I had plenty of symptoms of hypothyroid beyond unexplained weight gain, including a low body temperature (97.1), brain "fog," fatigue, depression, headaches, brittle nails, and a bunch of other things.

After doing a bit more research, including talking with a good friend who has a thyroid condition, I was convinced that something wasn't right. My original doctor, while a great guy, was a GP and likely didn't know how complex hypothyroid issues are and which panels to run, or how to read them. Finding a doctor to take me seriously and who knew enough to run the right tests took awhile, but eventually I did, thanks to the referral of a friend.

And waddaya know, but my T3 (the one that really matters) was in the toilet. So was my progesterone (which helps with stress, sleep, and mood), and a few other things, including Vitamin D, which was also contributing to my depression. I was indeed hypothyroid, among other things. My body was whacked out.

Almost as soon as I began taking the supplements I needed, my life, and my body, began to change. While the weight didn't come off in a flash, it did come off, slowly and steadily.

Here's a key point: I still had to do the work. 

I had to exercise, stay hydrated, and watch what I ate. But at least losing weight became possible, where before, it wasn't.

Something to note here: It's a horrid myth that to exercise you have to find something you like to do. I hate exercising, but I love having exercised. If you're waiting to like huffing and puffing and sweating like a pig, and you're using your dislike of exercise for not doing it, then you'll never have success. I often go running even when I hurt all over and I feel like someone's taking an ice pick to the back of my head. I go because it's something I have to do. I force myself to do it. I don't go to the gym when I feel good. I go to the gym and work my tail off so I'll feel good.

Another aspect in my success was that I started reading blogs of people who'd managed to lose weight and keep it off to learn more about how to fuel my body properly for weight loss (which takes more than cutting calories, of course). I grew up in a nutritious home, but there was still a lot to learn.

I'm now within (count 'em!) 9 pounds of my marriage weight. I'm solidly in the healthy range for what my weight should be, and on the low end of my old range. (I think I can actually hit that old marriage weight yet!) I sleep better (didn't even know how messed up my sleep was until it was fixed). I can exercise more. My chronic headaches are still around, but they're more manageable. My depression isn't the dark sink hole it once was.

No, life isn't all unicorns and rainbows. I still have chronic headaches. Depression of some kind just runs in my family. But things are so much better.

Losing the weight hasn't been an easy road. Like I said, it's still work. But now I can fit back into my skinny clothes, and my fat clothes are a thing of the past.

In my before picture up there, I hated myself.

But now? Well, this next picture was taken just over a week ago, at the LDStorymakers conference. I feel and look like myself again. Huzzah!

Random Sevenness

Rebecca tagged me for this one, and since I haven't blathered much (at least lately) about my non-writer self, here goes: Seven random things about me you probably didn't know.

1) I clean left to right. Or right to left. But I can't stand cleaning randomly. I have to see my progress and what needs to be done next. For example, when I'm cleaning the kitchen counter, one end will be clean and clear while the other is still messy with dishes and junk mail as I move my way across it.

2) I select my clothes left to right. Unlike people who organize their closets by color or whatever, here's what I do: I hang up clothes on the right side of the closet. When I get dressed, I try to find something from the left side first. This tells me pretty quickly what clothes I don't really like to wear (or which no longer fit or whatever), because they end up lingering on that end of the closet. If they sit there too long, I know it's time to get rid of them. Goofy, I know. But it has an additional bonus: I often stumble across clothing combinations I never would have thought of otherwise.

3) When I was a kid, I had toenail fungus in my left pinkie toe, which made it thick, yellow and weird shaped. We tried all kinds of home remedies to get rid of it. Somehow it's gone now. No clue why.

4) I'm becoming my parents. I'll pass a mirror and notice a facial expression or gesture that's totally Mom. Or I'll hear myself saying something that sounds eerily like Dad. (Notably, "Giiiiiirls . . . go to sleep!")

5) I had mumps as a kid. Twice. That's not supposed to be possible.

6) I have a scar on my chin thanks to my brother. Considering this is the guy who dragged me around in sleeping bags, locked me in the closet, and set my hair on fire (not kidding), you'd think it's a miracle that I don't have more scars. But here's the thing: I got my chin busted open while he was playing nicely with me. I think I was three.

7) I did my own nails for my wedding, complete with acrylic. They were bright red and looked awesome.

Your Wish . . . Sort of

A couple of people asked for a picture of The Purple Tent. I seriously don't remember ever seeing a picture taken from that Halloween. I wonder if I screamed and ran from the camera or something.

But here's one from the previous year (or the one before that . . . I'm not sure I'm remembering the dates), when all three of us sisters were gypsies:

I'm in the middle with the red head scarf.

Dontcha LOVE the 70s era curtains behind us, out-done only by the shag carpet?

Aw . . . look at my cute baby-fat cheeks. Wait. I STILL have the same cheeks. Baby fat isn't so cute when you're entering your mid-thirties, darn it.

Hope my sisters don't mind me posting that. Freaky thing is that they almost look like themselves still, especially Mel (left).

Of all my siblings (there's one more; my big brother isn't pictured. I think this was his year as a blue Incredible Hulk), I'm the one who's changed the most since childhood, to the point that my husband can't see me in my childhood pictures and people usually think my kids take after only their dad, not realizing that the kidlets actually look JUST like I did when I was two or four or six.

(Yo, reader friends out there who know my kids, don't I look JUST like my kindergartner in this picture?! I do, don't I! Totally!) Perhaps I'll blog more on that later.

To throw additional randomness in to this post, a word of advice: be careful what you blog about. As I mentioned, I've never had a problem with laundry, so I blogged about my nifty laundry system.

Bad Karma. Can you GUESS what the last two weeks have been like? Go on. Guess. Laundry CHAOS. (I almost used another word that sounds like the capital of Montana [HEL-ena], but this is a family-rated blog, so I just thought it.)

Serves me right. I get it now, people. I totally do. I'm majorly empathizing as I attempt to dig myself out from under it all and the kids keep coming to me asking if there are any clean jeans or underwear or shirts and I point them to the mounds and mounds of clean but unsorted clothes . . .

One Chore I'm Good at

I'm the first to admit that my house isn't as clean and tidy as it could (okay, should) be. I do work at it, although I also think that my kids need to be taught to do their share (one of many reasons I don't do Fly Lady—I may end up with a squeaky-clean house, but the kids won't be the ones cleaning the toilets. That's not okay with me).

Like most human beings, I dislike many areas of housework. But I've been surprised at how many times I've run into bloggers recently who say they abhor the one chore I don't really mind doing: laundry.

Really. I don't mind. It's rare that my laundry becomes a mountain of doom. It's one chore that almost takes care of itself. You load it and walk away. Sure, there's the folding afterward, but that's minor (and it doesn't involve crumbs or germs or dirt).

So it occurred to me that maybe my method of doing laundry is different, especially after I did that meme where I showed a picture of my laundry room and people commented on my sorting baskets. Doesn't everyone have baskets like that? My mom did when I was growing up, so I thought everyone had them.

Or maybe my method isn't anything special; I don't know. But since laundry really isn't a burden to me, and it is for many other people, I thought I'd mention it. If this something useful to know, I'll have Josi throw it up on her sidebar of posts with things that work. You tell me.

Here's how my laundry life will go today:

Fold the whites that have been sitting in a laundry basket over the weekend.

Load the clean items back into the basket that belong in Mom and Dad's room. Put them away.

While in our room, put dirty clothes from the hamper into the now-empty laundry basket.

Take those dirty clothes into the laundry room.

Sort them into the four baskets there: darks, lights, whites, and delicates. (Clothes that need to be pre-treated get slung over the edge of the basket so I can identify them later when it's their basket's turn.)

See which basket is fullest. (Today that will probably be the lights.)

Throw in a load of that basket. If it has two loads' worth, pre-treat any stains now so they can hop into the second load later today.

Take the now-empty basket back to the sorting area (the couch by the TV) and load up the kids' folded whites.

Trot downstairs and put each kids' pile on their beds. (The trick here is making sure the little people put their own clothes away after school. I have one kid right now who has three or four stacks on her bed. Last night, she slept on the floor. Cute.)

Once the basket is empty, load up the kids' dirty clothes from their dirty clothes baskets, located in their closets. If it ain't in the basket, Mom doesn't take it. (If it's awfully close to the basket, maybe I will—if it looks like a sock fell out of the basket, I might be generous. But underwear and jeans all over the floor? Sorry. If you run out of clean clothes, it's your fault for not putting them in the basket.)

Take the basket of dirty kids' clothes to the laundry room and sort into the four baskets.

Walk away until I feel like coming back later. (Be a mom, work on writing, editing, blogging, run errands, oh yeah, and that shower thing. Whatever.)

At some point after the washing machine is done (when it occurs to me), throw the wet clothes into the dryer.

If there's a lot of dirty clothes (say the "lights" basket has two loads' worth in it) and I'm in the mood, at this point, I might throw in another load of clothes, particularly if I already pretreated something.

I don't monitor the washer and dryer that closely. I'll transfer clothes when it occurs to me throughout the day (like if I'm in there feeding the cat or walking past the laundry room for some other reason).

When the clothes are all dry, unload them into the basket and call it a day. Sometimes they don't get all dry until bedtime. That's fine. They're clean, and they're dry.

That's it. I don't worry about folding all the clothes every single day. I know I'll get to the current basket of clean ones in the morning. Or tomorrow. Whenever.

So here's the photo from that meme again:


I have no idea what day of the week it was taken, but you can see that I probably did delicates that day, because the basket on the right is empty. And I probably did whites the day before that, because the whites basket is medium-ish. The darks and lights are both pretty full, so they'd be up next. I'd decide which to do the following day based on which one I did most recently if I remembered and/or what clothes I knew are needed next—or I'd pick one randomly.

There's a good chance that in the picture, the delicates are in the washer or dryer right now, because the brown basket (my trusty transporter one) is empty and on top of the dryer. You can tell that a few lights need to be pretreated because they're on the shelf (if there are several items that need treating, they'll be in a pile instead of simply draped over the edge of the basket.)

Here's the part where it's not a burden: if I do one or two loads on most days, then when things get chaotic (you know what that is like, right?) it's no big deal to skip a day or two. No one runs out of underwear or jeans for school.

I know I'll get to it. So it never gets to me.

Granted, there are some weeks I end up needing a few loads several days in a row, like after a family trip or after #2 came home from a week-long summer camp. But for the most part, if I just do a little laundry four or five days a week, it never builds up, and there's never a mountain to tackle.

Tada!

Now if I can just figure out a way to get the sweeping, vacuuming, and clutter issues under control, I'll be set. Maybe.