Confusing the words loose and lose is a very common mistake. I don’t want to offend anyone, but this has become a pet peeve of mine. The idea of “loose weight” brings horrible images to my mind. I imagine fat getting all lumpy and muscles hanging loose. Not a pretty picture, is it?

The dictionary defines the verb to loose as “to make less tight; slacken or relax.” That’s the last thing you want to do when you want to reduce your weight. I think what we really want to do is to lose weight so we end up with loose clothes.

Often when people cut their calories but don’t work out, they lose muscle as well as fat. Their bodies end up looking very loose and even gaunt. The right kind of exercise can counteract that and make you look firmer and slimmer.

Tighten Up, Not Loosen Up

You should have the three following components in your plan to get to a healthier, fitter you:

• Cardiovascular exercise, such as jogging or aerobics, is important for burning fat and losing weight. Most people seem to know that.
• Strength training is also very important, but it seems to be more controversial, especially among women. Strength training builds lean muscle tissue, which is much more active than fat. Muscle burns extra calories even while you sleep. Women don’t have enough of the hormone called testosterone to get bulky (unless they take steroids), so you don’t need to worry about that. Instead, it will give you a tighter, more defined look, especially once you’ve gotten the extra fat off your body. Michelle Obama is a good example.
• Proper nutrition is the third leg of this stool. As I’ve stated in other articles, you need to eat a well-balanced, calorie-controlled diet, too.

In summary, you need all three of these components–cardiovascular exercise, strength training, and proper nutrition–in the proper amounts to lose fat, get stronger, and improve your health.

So, please watch what you wish for and watch your language. Don’t say you want to “loose weight” when you really want to “lose it.” In fact, you should actually say you want to “lose fat.” You don’t want your weight loss to include muscle loss. In fact, gaining muscle is a good thing. However, realize that you’re probably not going to gain a lot of muscle, so don’t use that as an excuse if the scale doesn’t budge.

What language do you use when talking about this? What do you think about strength training? Please let me know in a comment bleow.

Robyn

photo by ste3ve

Now that I’ve really gotten into this “blogging thing,” I want to learn as much as I can about it. I’ve read a lot of tips and advice lately about “how to blog” and “what to blog about.” Many, many people have written about how feeling passion for your topics is crucial to your blog’s success. Some writers also add persistence, expertise, and a few other things to the list, but passion always seems to be at the top.

Here’s some of what I have gleaned from all this reading about passion and blogging:

• Passion gives you incentive to learn as much as you can.
• Passion encourages you to share what you know with others.
• Passion allows you to generate content consistently and continuously.
• Passion makes the work of blogging a labor of love instead of just labor.
• Passion gives you a better connection to your readers. They can tell when you care about them and what you write about. They can also tell when you don’t.

A Passion Progression

As I thought about all of this, I realized there’s a progression related to passion in blogging. It goes like this:

1. Blog a passion
2. Blog your passion
3. Blog your passion with passion

In my second post, Flabbergasted, I wrote about meeting Lorelle VanFossen, the amazing blogger at Lorelle on WordPress (and several other blogs). She autographed her book, Blogging Tips, for me and signed it “Blog your passion.” I mistakenly wrote in my post that she said, “Blog with a passion.”

She gently chastised me for it, and I changed it immediately. It’s a small difference, but an important one. Thank you, Lorelle, for pointing that out to me. (And thank you, WordPress, for the “update post” button.)

Let’s talk about each stage in the progression.

Blog a passion. Many people start writing a blog because they want to make money. They try to find a subject they think will be popular. These bloggers hope there will be enough people passionate about the subject to send them oodles of money. However, if it’s not a subject they’re passionate about themselves, they usually fail. It’s not enough to blog about just any passion. It has to be your own.

Blog your passion. Blogging about a subject you do feel passionate about is much more enjoyable and more likely to be successful. If you’re passionate about your subject, you’ll know more about it and are more likely to keep at it. When you’re writing about something you have a passion for, you’re much more likely to reach your goals for your blog, no matter what they might be.

Blog your passion with passion. While writing about your own passion is important, I believe we must consider another important aspect to this passion progression. To be truly effective, you must blog your passion with passion. It’s not enough to just feel the passion inside you about your subject; you also need to express it with passion. Let your feelings shine through in your writing. Let us feel your excitement about it. Don’t hold back. That’s when people will really start to care.

My Passions for This Blog

My overall theme for this blog is the art (and science) of personal transformation. I’m thinking about the various transformations so far in my life. I’m exploring ideas for other transformations I am making now and would like to make in the future. I hope that by sharing some of these thoughts and opinions with you, we can teach and learn from each other.

Obviously, the concept of personal transformation is extremely broad. Therefore, I plan to focus on the following four categories:

• Health – concentrating on diet and fitness
• Mindset – various areas I’ve been studying lately
• Writing – primarily business-related as opposed to fiction
• Friends – stories of friends’ transformations

These are the areas I’m currently the most passionate about. They still cover a lot of territory, and I’m sure we can go on for a long time about personal transformations involving them.

As I wrote in Losing 100 Pounds – The 5 Phases, I’ve been working on health and fitness a lot over the past few years. I’ve learned a tremendous amount about losing weight and getting fit, and I want to share my perspectives on that.

I haven’t written anything about mindset yet (I think that’s the term I want to use), but I know there’s a lot I want to say about it. Motivation, fear, and inspiration are just a few of many things we can talk about here.

Writing may seem a little out-of-place with the other two, but it’s a really important topic for me. It’s definitely related because it’s a big part of some of the transformations I’m making now and in the future.

If they’ll let me, I’d like to share some of my friends’ experiences with their own transformations, so you can see how others have done it. That way it’s not just my own story. There are other perspectives and ways to accomplish personal transformation. I’d like to explore those, too.

Do you have other thoughts about passion? Do you see it any differently? Please let us know in a comment below.

Robyn

photo by It’s Holly

Give me a red pencil, and you can consider me armed and dangerous. Grammar and spelling mistakes leap off the page at me. When I see something that’s grossly wrong, I often feel an overwhelming urge to fix it.

Do you follow the rules?

I know that grammar is often considered boring and stifling to your creativity. However, I disagree. I believe readers can become so distracted by poor grammar and spelling that they completely miss your point. Worse yet, they may totally misunderstand you and get it completely wrong.

I love the rules and the rhythm of grammar. Much like the wooden beams that support a house, grammar and spelling support the messages you are sending. They provide a foundation for your writing, which you can then decorate and embellish as you see fit. Here are quotes from two famous authors about grammar and punctuation.

“What I know about grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object being photographed.”
- Joan Didion

“My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.”
- Ernest Hemingway

Here’s an actual question I saw written on an English language discussion forum:

Why it is important to learn English through the grammar. Is it not enough when the communication understanable beetwen two people or more?

How many mistakes do you see in that?

I can get the gist of this, but it could be interpreted several different ways. Is this communication truly and easily understandable (or understanable, in this case)? For example, is the first sentence asking a question, or is it making some kind of statement?

When is a rule not a rule?

With all of that said, do you always have to follow all of the grammar rules you were taught in school? No, you don’t. Sometimes the rules, even the ones your teachers may have beaten into you, aren’t really rules at all. They’re really style choices. In some cases, they’re not even valid rules.

“Arguments over grammar and style are often as fierce as those over IBM versus Mac, and as fruitless as Coke versus Pepsi and boxers versus briefs.”
- Jack Lynch

Last week, I attended a book signing by Mignon Fogarty, aka Grammar Girl. She has a hugely popular and entertaining podcast called Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing. I highly recommend it. She wrote a book of the same name that was a New York Times bestseller. She has just published her second book, The Grammar Devotional, which gives 365 daily tips for successful writing.

Grammar Girl’s website says this, “Mignon believes that learning is fun, and the vast rules of grammar are wonderful fodder for lifelong study. She strives to be a friendly guide in the writing world. Her arch enemy is the evil Grammar Maven who inspires terror in the untrained and is neither friendly nor helpful.”

Two of my favorite Grammar Girl tips shoot down some tried-and-true rules. Are these true or false?

Never split an infinitive. FALSE. You can feel free to happily ignore this “rule.” However, you may still want to follow it on a resume, just in case your interviewer doesn’t know this. On page 134 of The Grammar Devotional, Mignon says, “Blame Latin for the logic behind the nineteenth-century rule about not splitting infinitives. In Latin there are no two-word infinitives, so it’s impossible to split ones, and English teachers decided that if it couldn’t be done in Latin, it shouldn’t be done in English.” She goes on to say that notions change over time, and today almost everyone agrees that it’s OK to split an infinitive, especially if it makes the meaning clearer.

Never end a sentence with a preposition. FALSE. On page 180, Mignon says, “One of the biggest myths of all time is that it’s blasphemy to end a sentence with a preposition. It’s certainly wrong to end a sentence with a preposition when you could leave the darn thing off and doing so wouldn’t change the meaning. So, of course, it’s wrong to ask, ‘Where is she at?’ It means the sane thing as ‘Where is she?’ Leave off the at. But nobody expects you to ask, ‘From where are you?’ or ‘On what did you step?’ No need for stuffy-sounding contortions.”

Once you know the rules of grammar, you can determine when and how to break them. It’s a bit like playing a game. There are great writers who break them all the time in order to get a specific effect. The difference is, they do it with intention and style.

I love grammar, and I love to play with it. I may be a grammar geek, but I’m not a grammar slave.

Spelling, on the other hand… Don’t mess with me on that.

What do you think? Are you a grammar geek or a complete grammar rebel?

Robyn

photo by notorious d.a.v. on flickr

These are questions I’ve been asking myself lately.  How easy is it for someone to change his or her life? Answer – It depends. How easy is it for me to change my life? Answer – It depends.

I don’t really like that answer. Unfortunately, it’s true. Many of us keep searching for the “ideal way” to fix everything – the quick fix that solves everything in an instant. Sometimes I wish there was a magic pill or formula to do that, but life just doesn’t work that way. I believe it takes a lot of small steps (and an occasional big leap) to make significant changes in your life.

There are many ways to go. Some doors swing wide open as you walk up or push with your fingers. Some doors require unlocking and pushing really hard. Some doors are opened for you when you knock on them.

Changing your life for the better requires a transformation in some way. In some cases, it’s a radical change like the proverbial caterpillar turning into a beautiful butterfly. In other cases, it’s much more subtle and gradual, like snow melting to reveal flowers pushing up from the earth. I believe we all have the power to transform our lives and the lives of those around us. In some cases, we can even transform the lives of people we have never met.

Why am I doing this?

I love to learn things, and this subject of transformation and growth has been fascinating me for a while. I would like to share ideas with anyone who might read this blog. I have a lot of interests, and I tend to keep myself really busy. Most of the time it’s probably too many things. Learning how to handle that is one of my biggest challenges now.

I have managed to make some big transformations in my life, and I’ll talk about some of those in future posts. However, I know I have also limited myself in many ways. Sometimes I get too caught up in “following the rules” and perfectionism. That can be a show-stopper for getting things done.

This blog is a good example. I created it months ago, and since then I’ve been fretting about getting it started off “just right.” Now, I think it’s finally time to put myself out there and post something. I’m sure I’ll falter and learn as I go along. One step at a time. Eventually, I hope I’ll transform myself into a blogger.

I’ve been studying blogging for a while – just not actually doing it! I’ve heard about keywords and SEO and monetizing and analytics and a bunch of other buzzwords. At this point, I’m not going to worry about any of that. I doubt that I ever will on this blog.

I know I’m supposed to give you advice and help you learn something here, too. Give me a little time, and I hope to do that. At least maybe you’ve learned a little bit about me now, for whatever that’s worth.

What is your approach to making changes? Are you a big leaper or a small stepper?

photo by Al_HikesAZ