I am not a doctor or health practitioner, so please just think of this as Advice From A Mom Who Is Also A Writer. I do believe our bodies will try to keep healthy more often than not if we give them the materials and physical support they need to do it. I have had things start to go wrong with mine as it ages, but so far I have found solutions that worked for me (I even shook fibromyalgia, though that took me 30 years), particularly solutions for joints and tendons and even more particularly the wrists and fingers. They may not work for everyone, but they are mostly of the won't-hurt-to try variety and not too expensive compared to the kinds of meds (or surgery) people go on for joint and tendon problems. Before I get to hands and wrists though, I want to say a word about general fitness for writers.
Get Up and Move
Writing is a sedentary job. If all you do with your butt is sit in a chair, before long you may find it sagging down to your knees when you stand up, and no write 'em cowgirl wants that to happen! If you want to stay healthy and keep writing for many fulfilling, productive years, you need to get out of the chair and move on a regular basis. There are a lot of different ways to get moving, including simply taking a regular walk if you live somewhere conducive to walking, but if you don't have some sort of movement you are already attached to, or if you want to try something new, you might consider checking out a little known (more's the pity) Chinese exercise regimen called Y-Dan (wei-dan).
I love Y-Dan. It is easy to learn from a video, and once you can do it on your own it only takes fifteen or twenty minutes to get through the whole routine. The gentle movements, stretches, and shakes get your blood moving and oxygenated and energize, loosen, and tone the whole body, while you barely break a sweat, and there are finger and wrist exercises built in, making it even more perfect for writers. Y-Dan has helped people recover from some kinds of back injuries, and it certainly helps keep my back in reasonable shape for my age. (If you have a compromised back or other health condition indicating caution, speak to your health practitioner before starting any new movement program.)
You can do Y-Dan in whatever you're wearing (unless it is horribly tight and uncomfortable, but why would you want to write in something like that?) without having to change clothes afterwards, and you don't need special shoes. It works best in the morning (or whatever passes for morning, if you are one of the crazy night owl write 'em cowgirls like me). It doesn't necessarily have to be your first minute out of bed, but Y-Dan will do the most for you if you do it before you have whatever passes for breakfast.
Most summers, my land and garden give me lots of opportunity to move, but in the off-season, moving outdoors gets difficult and dangerous because of ice and living on a hill. I can do Y-Dan indoors, and it definitely increases my energy and productivity. I think it has done a lot to help me keep off the seventy-five pounds I lost five years ago. The price of the DVD and shipping and a little time is a small price to pay for an easy and efficient way to keep your body in better shape. Your mind will be sharper too (it is, after all, extremely dependent on oxygenated blood), so you gain the time back in productivity.
You can learn more about Y-Dan and purchase a DVD here. I have done business with this company for years and they are very reliable. Be smart and watch the whole video at least once before trying it, and then take the instructor's advice about learning one or two movements at a time.
Hands, Wrists, Joints, and Tendons
Unless you are ready to move to dictation, if you want to keep writing you must learn to take care of your hands and wrists. The first-line most important thing you can do to help your wrists is DO NOT CROOK THEM when you sleep. Lots of people do this, but if you want to keep your ability to wrangle a pen and keyboard as long as possible, learn to just say no. It's probably a fetal thing. Get over it and indulge your inner child some other way. You are killing your wrists if you sleep with them crooked over tight like a shepherd's hook, taking years off their effective working life. This is really important. Do whatever you have to do to learn to sleep with your wrists relatively straight.
You want to shoot for a straight wrist and a relaxed position for your hands when sleeping (and as much of the rest of the time as you can). Get some extra pillows to prop them or sleep in carpal braces while you re-educate your body (or rig something with a padded homemade splint if you're really penny-poor, but not tied on so tightly it cuts off circulation!), but find a way. While you're at it learn not to ball your hands into fists in your sleep, either, if you've been doing that. You will save yourself a great deal of potential pain and disability (or at least ward off the advent much longer) with these relatively simple measures of keeping wrists straight and fingers relaxed as much as you can.
Therapeutic support gloves can help ward off (or at least slow progress of) wrist and hand problems, especially when you are pushing hard or your hands are tired. I don't need them all the time, but when I am on a deadline or doing a crazy marathon or (worst of all) doing a lot of handwriting with a pen, they are very, very helpful. I try to remember to get them whenever my wrists start to get that tired feeling in the middle. They are basically fingerless gloves (with one opening for the two middle fingers together) that support the hand and wrist very much the way support stockings help the feet, ankles, and calves. They need to fit snugly in the wrist. If a good fit in the wrist makes some of the finger holes too tight, you can put a few tiny snips into the fabric to give your fingers enough circulation, since the fabric is designed not to run. If they are too loose in the wrist, they will not be nearly as helpful (though you don't want them so tight in the wrist that your hand numbs or turns blue!). Two kinds are Hand Aids
(which come in pairs—for typing you would want two) and Handeze
. There is a good review of Handeze by a quilter here.
Earlier in the decade, when I was in my very late 40s, I developed stenosing tenosynovitis (aka trigger-finger/thumb) to a degree that became crippling. A cortisone shot in the joint at the base of my thumb, perhaps the most intensely painful procedure I've ever had, helped for several months. Then it started to come back. Then it started up in my left thumb and somewhere around then my right wrist became intensely painful. I had to… well there are things I'm not going to discuss here, but I had to learn to do many unaccustomed things left-handed for about a year. I literally could not use a can opener or a garlic press or a mortar and pestle, and I was starting to wonder if I was going to have to give up writing because it was becoming almost impossible to type or write with a pen and my thumbs would lock so bad I had to straighten them with the other hand (the alternative was to splint my thumb with a popsicle stick that extended down to my palm which makes using the spacer bar clumsy to say the least).
Image: Wikimedia Commons
She's cute, but the best plan to save your wrists is to keep them as straight as possible as much of the time as you can.
I was trying to nerve myself up for another round of cortisone shots when I decided to add flaxseed oil to my other supplements for general health reasons. Well, I can't exactly point to the day it happened, but three weeks later I was typing away at my keyboard and suddenly realized my thumbs were fine! Not only that but my wrist was feeling much better. I thought back and the only thing I could think of that I was doing different was the flax oil.
It's been years now, taking two capsules of flaxseed oil every day (am and pm) and my thumbs are still fine. After a year or two though, my wrist started giving me twinges again. I had read that fish oil (the Omega kind, not the kind people take for vitamin A) and turmeric are both anti-inflammatory without stomach irritation for most people, and turmeric in capsules is very inexpensive, so I added a capsule of turmeric at bedtime and increased my fish oil to two capsules (am and pm). My wrist cleared up again and is still doing well. (And some of those things are very good for your heart, too.) My cholesterol, which used to run ever so slightly high, is down enough to keep my doctor from trying to stuff me with drugs, and my blood pressure, which was always not too bad even back when I was morbidly obese, is very good these days. Oh, and an awful pounding noise in my ear that had plagued me for years became much better somewhere in there, too.
Then my shoulder started to go (did I mention that joint ailments run in part of my family?). That was bad. Sporadic, but when it hit it would come out of the blue and feel like someone was trying to separate my left shoulder joint with a rusty saw blade. Not conducive to speedwriting or concentration. Sleeping was a nightmare, since it woke me every twenty minutes all night long and no position was really comfortable. When I looked at a doctor's office poster that showed how the end of the bones/cartilage erode in the joint from rubbing up against each other when there isn't enough synovial fluid to lubricate the joint properly, I thought wow, that's exactly what it feels like. My doctor had nothing much to offer.
I did some research and found that an important ingredient in synovial fluid is something called hyaluronic acid. I started taking a supplement of that (20 mg., twice a day—it comes from coconuts) and my shoulder cleared up pretty quickly. These days I'm having a spot of hip trouble, but it's not too bad usually if I'm careful not to swivel too fast or spend time leaning forward while standing. Sometimes I take one extra aspirin or a couple of ibuprofen to go with the white willow bark I take at bedtime, if it's trying to kick up a fuss, but compared to what my hands and shoulder tried to pull on me, it's small potatoes so far.<taps head muttering "knock wood">
My life would be a nightmare by now without those supplements (and a lot of others I take, but those specifically helped my joints/tendons and gave me back my hands). I doubt I'd be sitting here typing this today without them. I haven't had ulcers in years, despite a very high stress life, because I learned what my body needed so I wouldn't have them or could nip them in the bud quickly if they tried to return, but if I went on something like a prescription anti-inflammatory medication or high doses of aspirin for joint pain they'd be back.
I don't need that. I'm not trying to be anybody's guru, just share some things that have worked for me. I do recommend that you pay attention to your body enough to notice, and if something is changing (I don't mean an immediate life-threatening call-911 emergency—I mean the cranky stuff that happens as our bodies age or other things that develop more slowly in a way that gives you time to work on them) do at least a spot of research to see if you can discover what it is your body really needs to correct the condition.
You are a writer. You know how to research (or if you don't, learning will be extremely beneficial to your writing), so use that skill for yourself. There are lots of bodily substances that tend to have production fall off in our later years. If you find what will help encourage that production and try to trust your body to want to do better if it gets the building blocks it needs, you may be able to help lessen this nation's terrible dependency on drugs that support an industry I'm convinced is far more interested in profitable palliation than cure, and you'll live a fuller life while you do it.
We order a lot of our nutritional and herbal supplements from Puritan's Pride. They have kind of a wacky rotating series of sales (best is usually when they do buy-one-get-two-free), but all of them add up to cheaper overall than anywhere else I've found where quality and service are reasonable and selection is good. We also order quite a few supplements from Swanson's Vitamins, and their research updates you can sign up to get in email are informative. They also have a confusing sale structure, but overall I think those are the two best sources for many supplements for people on a budget.
Diet
I believe that it's good to eat a wide variety of healthy foods (which, for me, does include animal products and flesh in moderate amounts) and to try to keep down consumption of highly processed ones, and to be moderate with fats and mostly eat the good ones, but I'm not a fanatic about it. I think that different bodies are different and different ways of eating are good for different people, but two things almost every take on how to eat right seems to share are the importance of eating enough vegetables and drinking enough water.
© Sharon Cousins 2009
Straight from my '03 garden, a birthday gift for my neighbor who loves vegetables.
Eat your vegetables.
Whether you are a meat-eater or a vegetarian, eat your vegetables. (Yes, even vegetarians may need this reminder—many eat more corn chips, pasta, and cheese than veggies.) Vegetables have, for the most part, a very hight nutritional vlaue for a relatively low cost in calores. Modern research is finding more and more things in vegetables that can help strengthen our immune systems and improve our overall health and wellbeing. If you don't like veggies, get creative with seasonings (though not too heavy on the butterfat and cheese!) or try other cooking methods and learn to like some of them.
A lot of people who don't like eating plain vegetables don't mind them mixed in soups or stir-fries or stews. The more vegetables you eat, especially ones in deep, rich, greens and yellows and oranges, the better you will feel, and the stronger your immune system will be. If you can buy them in season from a local source or grow at least some of them yourself, they will do even more for you (many nutrient counts go down during long storage and transportation). Skin, eyes, hair, immune system… veggies strengthen them all. It's good to have some fruit, too, especially berries, but the more vegetables you eat (as long as you don't drown them in fat and you are eating a variety—a straight carrot diet can temporarily turn your skin orange), the healthier you will be.
Drink water.
Your body is mostly water, and you lose a lot of it every day through sweat and other eliminatory processes. If you don't replace it, your health will suffer. If you don't drink enough water over a long period of time, your body signals can get confused. Your cells know they want water, but if the 'want water' message has been ignored too many times, sometimes that 'want water' message seems to shift to 'want food.' Your body may not really want food, but it knows it wants SOMETHING it is not getting, so it tries a new tack. If you feel hungry sooner than you think you should after eating—especially if you are overweight—the next time you want a snack, try drinking a glass of water and doing something else for five or ten minutes. In many cases you will find that it wasn't really food your body wanted after all, and that 'want' feeling will be satisfied.
If you have trouble drinking a whole glass of water all at once, try doing what I do. Keep a glass of water (or a water bottle if I'm out in the world) handy all the time and remember to sip at it regularly, especially if your body is starting to send out hunger signals. Do whatever you can to make sure you are drinking a minimum of six glasses of water a day (eight is even better, plus it's a good idea to add an additional glass for every cup of coffee or tea or caffeinated soda that you have, because all of those things are diuretic, which means that you will usually lose more liquid than you take in when you drink those things). If you really dislike the lack of taste in water (I know people who do), add a slice or splash of lemon or lime, or make iced tea from non-diuretic herbs or herbal blends or splash in a little fruit juice. There's nothing wrong with real fruit juice or milk (if your body tolerates milk) or hydrating herbal teas, but milk and juice have enough calories that you don't want to get all your hydration that way. If you stay well hydrated your body and mind will work better, so fill a glass with cool, clear water and drink a toast to write 'em cowgirls everywhere!
Give Real Salt a Try.
Real Salt is the brand name of a special sea salt. Mined from deep in the earth in Utah, Real Salt is the remains of ancient seas, from back when the world was a much cleaner place in terms of the kinds of pollution people have created. It is crushed to various grades and sold without further processing, unlike modern sea salts. This is the American version of that Himalayan salt that is all the rage right now and it offers very similar health benefits. It contains the full complement of trace minerals of sea water, and brings out the flavor of foods better than any other salt I have ever used. Many people on the testimonials page say that Real Salt is the only salt they've used that doesn't send their blood pressure up, and some of them say it has helped with assorted aches and pains.
Three people live at our house, all over 50 (one over 60). We use Real Salt exclusively, except for pickling. None of us have a blood pressure problem. The main reason we use Real Salt is that it makes foods taste better than other salts, but I also believe that trace minerals are very important to good health, and Real Salt is full of them. Real Salt also meets all Jewish dietary guidelines. You can learn about Real Salt, purchase Real Salt products online, and find out if there is a store near you that carries their products at: http://www.realsalt.com/.
Things I Mostly Try to Avoid — Take What You Need and Leave the Rest!
I'm not a fanatic. There are a few things I still eat that contain small amounts of some of these items, but keeping consumption down to a few favorites has definitely helped me feel better.
Artificial Sweeteners
I know they are popular, but almost all the people I know who use them have a lot more health challenges than I do. They can make your body crave carbohydrates, so they won't necessarily help you lose weight, and just about everyone I know who drank them to try to avoid diabetes got it anyway. If you want a sweet flavor without the calories of sugar, try some of the stevia products (simple products derived from a sweet-flavored herb that people have used for centuries, but if you don't like it there are other low-glycemic, lower calorie natural sweeteners available). If you drink a lot of diet pop, try to slowly wean yourself to more water or iced herbal tea or mix sparkling water with a little real fruit juice. (I love pop—though not the diet kind—but I've got myself down from one can a day to 1-2 per week, except for conference weeks, and I'm feeling much better as a result and doing even a more solid job of keeping the weight off.) I'm not the diet police, and your life is yours to live, but that's my best advice, and it has stood me in good stead so far.
The only artificial sweetener I have any use for is aspartame (aka N*tra-Sweet, the stuff that has been so popular in a number of soft drinks and other products). Aspartame works great for killing ants! While I try to have a live and let live attitude, sometimes ants will intrude where you just can't let them stay (and they are certainly not an endangered species where I live). I do most of my summer cooking with sunshine, lining my solar cookers up on a retaining wall alongside my driveway, and the ants get so bad in early summer that I can't lean on the wall without having them crawling all over me, the potholder, and anything else that makes contact. I remembered an email someone had sent me about using aspartame to kill ants and I had some old packets from years ago when my diabetic mother-in-law visited us. I made some piles and trails where the ants were busiest. The next day there were fewer ants so I did it once more. That was it. There were almost no ants on the wall the rest of the summer, and this trick has worked two summers in a row for me on that wall. Aspartame was originally developed as an insecticide, before they decided they could get people to buy it because it tasted better than saccharine, and I think that's the only good use for it. Your mileage, of course, may vary.
High-fructose corn syrup
This stuff is about as artificial as you can get starting with a natural ingredient. Weird stuff. I gather there are certain mysteries about its production. There is more and more evidence that our bodies don't know what to do with it. It can make your body crave carbs or overeat, because it is such an odd substance that it doesn't trigger a "full" signal in your body no matter how much of it you take in. I'm not saying sugar is good to consume in large quantities, but I think it is way better for you than high-fructose corn syrup, and I wish I could get a good cane cola where I live. Probably the only good thing about the way bio-diesel is driving up the price for corn is that more pop (and salad dressing, and lots more stuff) companies will go back to sugar instead of this nasty stuff.
Trans-fat
This is getting lots of bad press right now, and for good reason. It's about time. Adelle Davis was warning people about the dangers of hydrogenated oil decades ago, and I mostly believed her. We stayed with butter (moderately) all through the years people were changing to margarines (though I used some margarine for occasional baking, for economy's sake), and I've only used shortening when absolutely nothing else would work (seldom, except for greasing pans for certain very fancy-mold cakes, because it does work even better than butter for that). Maybe that's one reason my blood pressures always been normal or a little below (even when I was morbidly obese), and my cholesterol has never been high enough to make my doctor push too hard for medication, and it was down at my last check-up. My family has always eaten way less than the national average for trans-fat, and it shows. (My husband is 62 and still doesn't need any prescription meds, which is pretty darn good for an American.)
MSG
I think it's better to avoid it if you can. I love Ranch dressing mix, which contains it, and we do use that sometimes, or very occasional crunchy snack foods containing it, but for the most part I try to find products that don't contain MSG. There are lots of other ways to bring out flavor in foods.
Summing It Up
So there is some of my best health advice. I'm 56 (until 8/3/09) and don't need any full-time prescription drugs, and I only get sick enough to need a doctor once every two or three years at most (though I go more often for preventative women's care).
If anyone reading this has experience on hand and wrist care that I have not covered and you would like to share, please feel free to email me with information about what helped you. Ditto for get-up-and-move routines or disciplines that have helped you be a healthier writer.
Cowgirl Call to Action! Help for Haiti! Operation Matènwa!
