Skinny fat people: no place in a peace-time Army

I turned to one side, then the other, and sighed at my reflection in the mirror.

“I’m fat.”

I poked at the skin on my arm. Yep. Definitely a wobble there.

My reflection was flabby. I was flabby. Not overweight, but very out of shape: skinny and fat at the same time. That’s not a happy state to be in with a physical fitness test (APFT) coming up.

To add to the pressure, my command had just reminded us about the Army’s revised retention posture, which came into play in 2013 and is expected to last through 2017. To shift to a leaner, peace-time fighting force, the Army intends to take a closer look at who is in the service, and trim the excess (i.e., mandate separations). Part of the ‘to trim or not to trim’ determination would come from enforcing tighter physical fitness standards for regular and reserve Soldiers.

No more coddling: Pass that APFT or get out.

Would a skinny fat girl like me continue to have a place in this Army?

I haven’t always been so blubbery. As I stared in dismay at my reflection, though, I realized things had reached a tipping point. My physique was due in part to laziness, in part to poor diet, in part to injury (bad backs – yeah, they suck), but the decline was of my making.

Perhaps I could squeak by with a minimal pass in my APFT, but would the minimum be good enough? Mediocrity is a terrible thing, and I can only imagine a promotion board looking at my packet one day and saying, “This Taylor…she’s okay. But this Soldier over here is awesome.” And being ‘okay’ wouldn’t be good enough.

But what to do about it?

At 32, I no longer have the whippet-like ability of my younger self to go from flab to super fit at the drop of a hat. I also don’t have any experience designing my own fitness regimen. And I certainly don’t have tons of money to throw at a personal trainer to play drill sergeant to my lazy, wheezy self.

Even with all those excuses, though, I decided to do something about it.

I started going to the gym in my neighborhood. That gym is free for residents – always good for a girl on a budget – and I muddled my way through a week of workouts before admitting I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I nearly gave up.

Instead, I contacted a friend of mine who has a background in personal fitness and competitive bodybuilding. She is also a Soldier in the Oregon Army National Guard who I met on deployment in 2013.

“Brittany: Help!” I said to her. “I sat on my butt too much and the flab is overwhelming!”

Star that she is, Brittany pointed me in the direction of a website (bodybuilding.com) that offers free workouts and nutrition advice for all kinds of people, newbies to incredible hulks alike. I jumped on it right away.

Maybe you’re wondering, “Yeah, sure. Was it really so easy?”

Well, that part was. But the next part was harder. That was the carving out time each day to exercise part, the part where I noticed what I was eating and when, the part when I tried to replace bad habits with good.

Egad that’s tough. I’ve slipped up. I’ve eaten cake. I’ve drunk a soda or two (or, ahem, three). I was sick for a week (yay, food poisoning) and my momentum stuttered. But I kept going to the gym. I kept trying.

After a few weeks of working out, I took my APFT. I did the best I’ve done in years and scored a 270 combined out of the possible 300 points. Of course there’s plenty of room for improvement, but that’s miles better than my flabby self who sighed at her reflection would’ve done. Even with the APFT done and gone until next year, I still go to the gym because I don’t want to see that out of shape girl in the mirror again.

Mediocrity is an awful thing, but it’s possible to be better than just okay. Let’s end the skinny fatness with a bit of perseverance, grit and sweat.

Our health and our careers are worth it.

Outlines, signposts, roadmaps, where am I going and why?

Huh. The title to this post sounds a bit like a self-help book, but it's really a musing about my process for starting to write. I suppose a more enterprising soul could draw parallels to life-journeys, but I’ll keep this to writing.

When I was in college, I had an extremely organized friend who was absolutely brilliant with outlines. You know, the whole 'I, II, III' and 'A, B, C' thing. She would initially start her project in traditional outline form, and then expand it with more and more detail as her research came together. Finally, she would pull out all the 'I, II, III' and 'i, ii, iii' stuff, add punctuation and formatting, and call it a day. Her outline grew into the finished product.

As for me...well, I would start out with 'I. Introduction' and 'V. Conclusion,' and maybe get as far as the second tier of the outline before scrapping the whole thing to just start writing. My professors were often very annoyed with my hemming and hawing, particularly when an outline was a required stage of the project.

I maintained, then, that the outline was an artificial structuring for my thoughts: if it didn’t help me reach my objective of a finished essay, why should I bother? I think better in paragraphs.

Even to this day, I don’t write traditionally structured outlines, but my attitude to the process has changed somewhat.

Outlines are about the plan, about knowing where you are going and why. Given human limitation, most of us can’t hold in our brains tons of information and all its relational detail with communicable clarity without writing down at least the bare-bone ideas. And when we write it down, we organize it so that the steps of logic are retained.

This is plotting, pure and simple. (More practical folks may read ‘plotting’ and think of maps; devious folks may involuntarily cackle…both would be correct.) An outline’s structure - artificial though it may be - serves to highlight relationships, orders of logic, so on and so forth. A paper or story that doesn’t pay mind to the relations between topics and the inherent logic of a subject is more than likely unreadable. And that just sucks if you’re the reader.

So what’s a writer to do if a series of Roman numerals and alphanumeric combinations stall a thought process?

I’ve come across several alternatives in my time as a writer, and I’ll list a few I’ve found beneficial.

One more well-known fiction writer says he finds himself a giant piece of paper, puts a line on it with the story’s end state on one end and the beginning on the other, and then adds the major plot points at various intervals along the line. He then fills in the details as they occur, until he has a chronological and linear representation of the plot.

Another option is sort of like brainstorming. It can be either an entirely mental exercise (not to be attempted if your memory is poor), or accompanied by note-taking; either way it’s usually a very free-form, tangential-thought sort of process. In this method, a writer envisions the plot from beginning to end, tracing out the steps that will take the story/essay from point A to Z. The writer may ask him- or herself ‘well, what would provoke this?’ or ‘this needs to happen, but how?’ or ‘why might my character think this?’ - and goes from there. At a certain point, after at least the major plot strokes have been resolved, it all goes on paper.

Finally, there are plot sketches. Once again, the writer must have an idea of the beginning and end, but then sketches a single character’s path along the route from A to Z. Or Z to A - whichever works. In focusing on the single character, the author does not worry overmuch about plot holes, instead tracking that one character’s journey. Then the author moves to a second character and so on, until by sketching each of the main characters/villains/protagonists/antagonists/etc., the plot is described more or less in full. This works when a story follows several characters throughout and each one’s individual story advances the overall plot. It’s kind of like weaving.

I prefer the latter two, though I like to mentally hammer out where I’m going with a story before I put pen to paper.

Even after I've finished my plotting and started writing, though, sometimes I have to pause and reconsider the logic. For instance, when I was writing the story I just published (Convicted Innocent), I had to pause toward the end to figure out what sort of scene the bad guy would likely have put together to trap the good guys. My original intention no longer fit: it wasn’t devious or insidious enough for a bad guy supposedly known for his sleight of hand. So I had to retrace the logic I’d established before and come up with a climax suitable for all characters involved, since my heroes had to find some sort of resolution in that scene as well. The published result worked pretty well (in my opinion).

That last bit illustrates a very important thing about outlining and plotting: writing, no matter how well mapped out, must remain fluid. If something doesn’t work, a writer must suck it up and get rid of it, and an outline is but a tool to get to the finished work. Eventually, all those I, II, IIIs, and the sketches, and the plot lines drawn out on big sheets of paper must be set aside so the writer can do just that. Write.

But only after plotting. Cheers!

Intro

So. Writing about writing. Is that what this blog is about?

Well, yes, but it's also about the creative process. The why, the reason, the means, the method - or at least what they are for me.

Cheers!