Business of Writing Mini-Series: Health, Fitness and the Writing Life with Jennifer Gale

It’s that time of year and for some of us, that time of life, where living the creative life – and especially the writing life – may require some adjustment to our routines to include that most wonderful of words, exercise! Today’s guest, Jennifer Gale, is a certified Wellness Coach. She has a Masters in Science, is an international speaker and researcher, and will soon release her book, How to Get Fit and Stay That Way. I’m the first to admit that Jennifer has her job cut out bringing me back to the slim, svelte shape of my youth but with all credit to her, she’s going to try. There are things every fit and healthy person needs to do as part of their daily lives and today, Jennifer shares with all of us the tips, tricks and tools to help us along the way to that magical place that is alas, part of that fantasyland known to me as my misspent youth. But don’t worry, Jennifer has personal experience to support her ideas. At fifty, she participated in her first triathlon but she had to learn to ride and swim first. So, if you – like me – need a little reminding that the good life comes with a price, pour yourself a glass of wine and listen in as Jennifer promises to get us all back on the path to good health and fitness in 2017. Happy writing, everyone.

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Writer on the Road is Sponsored by Fit N Fifty Plus. Please visit Jennifer here (http://fitnfiftyplus.com.au/)  and don’t forget to mention I sent you:)

(#)

Duration; [00:36:17]

Melinda: It's welcome to another episode of Writer on the Road. I've got with me today someone who I think I need very, very much and I'm hoping that some of you may gain something out of this conversation as well. But if you don't you can live in eternal hope that your podcast extraordinaire will be in good hands and good health leading into 2017 and my year of living creatively. I'd like to welcome today Jennifer Gale, hello Jennifer.

Jennifer Gale: Hi Melinda it's lovely to be here and lovely to be interviewed for a change.

Melinda: Now Jennifer would you like to tell us what you do?

Jennifer Gale: Okay so I have a company called Fit n Fifty Plus which sometimes gets some people scrambled because and was taken on the blue [00:00:45] (unclear) so it's an "n" and I provide health and fitness coaching for women over fifty really looking at the whole woman though not just I want you to run up the street and I want you to do twenty squats. I like to look at whole woman because as you get older things actually change quite a bit and there aren't too many people out there training that actually understand that. So I also have a whole lot of other things and my mantra is to provide information and inspiration for women over fifty to look better, move better and feel amazing.

Melinda: Now I'm all in for feeling amazing because I'm feeling a bit haggard at the moment, I've just come off school, I'm tired, I'm grumpy. But the good news is it's my birthday and so--

Jennifer Gale: Oh happy birthday!

Melinda: Yeah, so I'm 55 and I'm about to start my year of living creatively.

Jennifer Gale: Perfect age.

Melinda: Jennifer is going to get me fit and fantastic and get me on, there's a bike ride here in, I don't know it's next year 2017 and it's called the Cycle of Giving and you can ride 100 kilometers and you pay for the privilege of doing it. So I'm going to line Jennifer up, I'm going to keep you updated on my health and fitness, Jennifer, Penn on the Creative Penn podcast she walked 100 kilometers, I'm going to cheat and ride my bike.

Jennifer Gale: What fun.

Melinda: Yeah so Jennifer you've got a big job ahead of you and I wish you all the best. But let's go back to the beginning. Jennifer your qualifications are pretty impressive. Would you like to...

It’s that time of year and for some of us, that time of life, where living the creative life – and especially the writing life – may require some adjustment to our routines to include that most wonderful of words, exercise! Today’s guest, Jennifer Gale, is a certified Wellness Coach. She has a Masters in Science, is an international speaker and researcher, and will soon release her book, How to Get Fit and Stay That Way. I’m the first to admit that Jennifer has her job cut out bringing me back to the slim, svelte shape of my youth but with all credit to her, she’s going to try. There are things every fit and healthy person needs to do as part of their daily lives and today, Jennifer shares with all of us the tips, tricks and tools to help us along the way to that magical place that is alas, part of that fantasyland known to me as my misspent youth. But don’t worry, Jennifer has personal experience to support her ideas. At fifty, she participated in her first triathlon but she had to learn to ride and swim first. So, if you – like me – need a little reminding that the good life comes with a price, pour yourself a glass of wine and listen in as Jennifer promises to get us all back on the path to good health and fitness in 2017. Happy writing, everyone.

Writer on the Road is Sponsored by Fit N Fifty Plus. Please visit Jennifer here and don’t forget to mention I sent you:)

Read Full Transcript

Duration; [00:36:17]

Melinda: It's welcome to another episode of Writer on the Road. I've got with me today someone who I think I need very, very much and I'm hoping that some of you may gain something out of this conversation as well. But if you don't you can live in eternal hope that your podcast extraordinaire will be in good hands and good health leading into 2017 and my year of living creatively. I'd like to welcome today Jennifer Gale, hello Jennifer.

Jennifer Gale: Hi Melinda it's lovely to be here and lovely to be interviewed for a change.

Melinda: Now Jennifer would you like to tell us what you do?

Jennifer Gale: Okay so I have a company called Fit n Fifty Plus which sometimes gets some people scrambled because and was taken on the blue [00:00:45] (unclear) so it's an "n" and I provide health and fitness coaching for women over fifty really looking at the whole woman though not just I want you to run up the street and I want you to do twenty squats. I like to look at whole woman because as you get older things actually change quite a bit and there aren't too many people out there training that actually understand that. So I also have a whole lot of other things and my mantra is to provide information and inspiration for women over fifty to look better, move better and feel amazing.

Melinda: Now I'm all in for feeling amazing because I'm feeling a bit haggard at the moment, I've just come off school, I'm tired, I'm grumpy. But the good news is it's my birthday and so--

Jennifer Gale: Oh happy birthday!

Melinda: Yeah, so I'm 55 and I'm about to start my year of living creatively.

Jennifer Gale: Perfect age.

Melinda: Jennifer is going to get me fit and fantastic and get me on, there's a bike ride here in, I don't know it's next year 2017 and it's called the Cycle of Giving and you can ride 100 kilometers and you pay for the privilege of doing it. So I'm going to line Jennifer up, I'm going to keep you updated on my health and fitness, Jennifer, Penn on the Creative Penn podcast she walked 100 kilometers, I'm going to cheat and ride my bike.

Jennifer Gale: What fun.

Melinda: Yeah so Jennifer you've got a big job ahead of you and I wish you all the best. But let's go back to the beginning. Jennifer your qualifications are pretty impressive. Would you like to tell us about them?

Jennifer Gale: Well like most women I feel like an imposter most of the time but yes I have a masters of science but more importantly I have a background in cardiology and intensive care so I actually established three phase cardiac rehab program in New South Wales. So my background is really caring for people that are not well. So I know a lot about physiology and the physiology of exercise and what exercises do what to you and so I've worked with the hardest cases Melinda and managed to get them fit.

So I've had some in my past, I've worked with thousands of people particularly women but like real claims to fame where getting some of my heart transplant people to do marathons and things like that. So I believe that everybody can do whatever they want to do if [00:03:15] (unclear) to take it slowly and you know what you're doing.

So my background really is in health and in really the science of being healthy and well. So you'll notice on many of the things that I give you or any of the things on my website or anything like that I always try and research the very depths of it because there's a lot of misinformation out there particularly about how to exercise, how to care for yourself, what to eat and a lot of it's not based on science. And of course because I've got a science background I'm a bit thingy about that.

So that's my background and if you read a little bit more, I've always been a healthy person but I was a very busy person, I was an executive and ran hospitals and all kinds of crazy things like that. But my husband got really sick when I was fifty and he nearly died and I'd always wanted to do triathlon and I thought to myself what on earth are you waiting for. So I had to teach myself how to swim and how to ride, I already knew how to run and so off I went. During that process I learned an enormous amount about what wasn't available for women over fifty.

So all the little bits of information about how to buy a bra, how to buy shoes, what kind of socks should you wear, what should you eat, how fast should you run because it's so different when you're fifty than when you're twenty because when you're twenty your body will actually respond and recover so much faster and it will forgive you a lot more than it does when you're fifty. So yeah, so that's a little bit about me. I'm really passionate about helping women understand how easy it is to be well and getting, supporting them to do that.

Melinda: Jennifer's being a little bit shy here, she missed her masters degree in science, she missed that she's an international speaker, research, certified wellness coach and an author of a book that we're hoping we may be able to give a couple of copies away once it's released sometime between now, before Christmas and after Christmas.

But it has the most amazing cover, the podcast has the most amazing cover. It makes me feel good because it's pink and bright green and I'm thinking I like the colors their mantra is participating fully in our lives and I think as writers I'm just wondering how difficult it is to get the balance sometimes with so much going on, families, writing, the business of writing for us indie publishers and sometimes having to do work at an outside job as well. Life gets a little bit topsy turvy at times Jennifer.

Jennifer Gale: It does, it does and there is one key thing to all of that and that's actually planning. The most, if you do nothing else in your life you need to sit down for about fifteen minutes on a Sunday probably and think what on earth am I doing in my week and where am I going to fit me in because you have to actually take care of you because you're the powerhouse for all of those things and if you don't all of those things will fall over. If, that is the one thing that all successful healthy women do, they plan their weeks which means they plan when they go to exercise and they plan what they're going to eat and they plan their ten minutes just on their own, just emptying their brain or doing a bit of meditation or whatever. It's the absolute key when you're busy. And having written a book I understand how hard it is to keep healthy when you're writing because you get in a vane and you can't stop and really you've got to know enough about yourself to understand where you're going to fit that 30 minutes in for you every day.

Melinda: Okay look it's been great having you on the podcast Jennifer, everybody you heard it here on Writer on the Road. I don't want to hear anymore because I'm all sad now I'm thinking I can't find 30 minutes a day it's all too hard. Set me an easier goal!

Jennifer Gale: We start off with that. I've started off people just doing five minutes.

Melinda: Yeah and it is amazing everybody that we do get wrapped, oh so very wrapped up in our businesses and our writing and I know full time writers I have some amazing women on the podcast Jennifer and they will write up to 5,000 more words a day and trouble is most of them are full time writers and independently wealthy from their writing and they can go for long walks on the beach in between times.

Jennifer Gale: Oh that sounds good.

Melinda: Annie Seaton I'm talking about you now. It's crazy and it's a whirl, I guess it's for the rest of us who have families, who have full time jobs, who are writing, who are business people. Now what inspired me a little bit with you is you ran a triathlon at the age of fifty but you couldn't ride a bike or swim, how amazing is that?

Jennifer Gale: Well I tell you it was a big journey, particularly the riding part. My husband used to be a really good cyclist and so one of the things in his treatment was really effecting his ability, he took really high dose cortisone which sends you a little bit psychotic for a bit and I thought if I had something that he could help me that would really help take his mind off it. So I had to buy a bike, I bought a $250 bike, RS bike and down we went to the village road and learned how to ride and I tell you the first time I crashed into the fence. It was hilarious, it was hilarious but it's amazing, it's just amazing what you can do when you start.

You just have to start. Then I think nothing of going for a 50 k ride, like it's nothing, it's really nothing. But just getting the around the village, the worst thing for me was turning around. I used to stop the bike and turn the bike. The first time I turned around properly was at my actual triathlon and I was so proud of myself because I didn't stop the bike to turn the bike around.

Melinda: Well turning a bike around. I am a toddler, I love tooling around dirt tracks out in the bush where there's nobody and I avoid hills if I can, although I did live on the west coast of Tasmania and I rode from Rosebery to Zeehan to have a go [00:09:47] (unclear).

Jennifer Gale: That's a good ride.

Melinda: It was an amazing ride and it was really good right. But I was as you said a hell of lot younger then. In village though, isn't a circle?

Jennifer Gale: Yes it is, so Salam [00:09:58] (unclear) was quite easy when I was learning but my awful son and my awful husband said okay now you've got to turn around and go the other way. So it was quite hilarious. I can do it now, I can turn around no problems, I wouldn't say I was an incredibly confident rider and I think that's just because I started a bit older. But the more and the more you ride the more confident you are. So at the moment I haven't been riding a lot, I've been running if any of you follow me know that I'm on a mission to do a half marathon next year. So I've been running a lot. So I haven't really ridden that much in the last year but I have a beautiful bike now, so I have a special women's triathlon bike. Yeah, so that was good.

The thing about swimming that was really nice was I discovered a new way of learning to swim and the name will come to me shortly. But it's about being more fish like in the water. So this is an adult way of swimming and they do it all over the world, I'll look it up in my email in a minute and they teach you to lie in the water rather than teach you stroke so you learn how to feel your body in the water before you do any swimming and it was just the best thing.

I ended up doing an open water swimming course and swimming in storms out to sea, I'm not at all scared at all of the water anymore and that was, learning to swim was really beautiful. It's the most beautiful thing you can do, you glide through the water, it's quite, you can't take your phone, no one can talk to you, you're on your own with the water supporting your body, it's just beautiful.

The first time I did, when I did my first triathlon I only had to swim, I think it was 200 meters, it was a baby one and I was out of the water second or third last and I was so mad at myself because I couldn't swim the whole way like I turned over and backstroked and everyone was faster but I learned an enormous amount doing that.

The funny thing was you spend so long trying to remember all these rules in triathlon like how to find your bike when you come out and there's 700 bikes there and I'd made great pains to know where my bike was. Of course when I came out there's only two left so it was quite easy to find my bike. But yeah it was an interesting as an adult to learn those things. It was good, it was great for me, met some amazing people. There's nothing quite like mixing with really super fit people to make you super fit. One thing they never do is smoke.

Melinda: Or have a glass of wine after work.

Jennifer Gale: Yeah you don't, I didn't drink when I was training, so when I'm training for a triathlon I don't drink during training season. It just, it effects your training too much. I might once a week have a glass of wine but I was a CEO then, so CEOs generally drink a lot, I can tell you it's part of the position description. So that was an interesting thing for me to, yeah having a job like that and then not to drink it was really good, really fun.

Melinda: Yeah and I think it's part of the job description for writers. I think the writers work all day but you get to that stage at the end of the day and you think I've worked really hard and I'll have a glass of wine. I stayed home, I waved the last two days of school because I threw my shoulder out that went down to my elbow and up to the back of my neck and I had to stay home. Basically I worked all day on my business and I got to about half past five, six o'clock and I think oh I've worked really hard I'll go outside and have a glass of wine and I thought it doesn't matter, even when I've through a fit look and I'm injured I just think oh end of the day I'll have a glass of wine and it's just habitual. It started when my eldest daughter was born.

Jennifer Gale: Funny that. We used to call it the suicide hour where my friend next door used to ring me and say please come before I throw the wine cask at her.

Melinda: Oh yeah mine started in, oh that's Jennifer, my started, I never drank until I was 25 and my first husband I we went on a yacht and we lived on a yacht for many years and happy hour was a tradition among yachties. I notice on your gravitas that you have a picture of a yacht.

Jennifer Gale: Ah yes, well actually you know that is, that's a tall ship and I love being out on the water and we went for our thirtieth wedding anniversary went to New Zealand, to the Bay of Islands and we went out on the tall ship, the Tucker Thompson I think it's called and they let me go out right out on the bow like Titanic style, so that's what that picture is. My husband took that picture which is why it's not that great. But I loved it, it was so much fun just being out on the bow.

Melinda: Yeah and I think it comes back to being able to do those things and as we get older, Jennifer has written a book and we're going to talk about that everybody in a minute so just be patient with me, I am getting there. But as we get older in order to do all the things that we want to do we, and Jennifer's talking about bike riding and triathlons, I'm not going to go to that extreme but I do want to be able to get back on my bike, I do want to be able to play my 18 holes of golf because now that I'm living creatively I have to play golf, it's called networking. I went to a business in heels function.

Jennifer Gale: Oh yes I heard about that.

Melinda: Absolute disaster I though I'm going back to the golf course.

Jennifer Gale: Take one for the team.

Melinda: Yeah much safer. But you've got here nine things every fit and healthy woman needs to do. Okay nine things, we can do nine things everybody can't we?

Jennifer Gale: Yeah we call all do nine things because they're simple. The key is to actually inchoate it into your daily living. So the key is not to do it on top of, it's, the key is to do as a part of and most of those things are things that you can do as part of your day, really. I mean being mindful about what you eat, that's not hard. Just think about it, think about what you're eating, instead of eating really, really fast make sure that you stop, enjoy it, think about it because as soon as you start to think about it you actually slow up, you don't eat as much, it's been proven you don't eat as much and you eat better because you actually taste it. There's this thing called the crunch factor that your brain turns on when you crunch. So most of the crunchy things in life like nuts and celery and things like that, the crunch actually tells your brain that you've eaten and helps you to feel full. So yeah they're all things that you can incorporate. We'll talk about them in length as we go along.

Melinda: I'm in trouble team, help me. Now there is a page dedicated to chocolate on Jennifer's website. Tell us about chocolate because we can still have it and I know from my old organic eating days and my earth mother days that it is okay to eat chocolate but usually dark chocolate.

Jennifer Gale: Yeah so I put the chocolate on because lots and lots of women love to eat chocolate and I thought I need to really understand the science of this and there is a science behind chocolate, it's like red wine. They both have something in it that helps the cholesterol level inside your arteries. So it's like a scavenger if you like getting rid of the bad things but the key to eating chocolate is to not eat too much of it and to only eat really good quality chocolate. As soon as you start to put those things on you can actually can't afford to eat a kilo of chocolate. So buying a kilo of chocolate's not a good thing to do. But having six or eight squares of dark chocolate is a really good thing to do for your body and it tastes so nice.

So my husband and I have got this thing about fair trade and slaves and children and all that kind of stuff, so we've stopped eating [00:18:07] (unclear) chocolate as it is and unless they can tell us that the cocoa beans are harvested by children who are being paid nothing and that the farmers aren't being ripped off we don't buy it but that does mean that our chocolate is $8 a block.

Melinda: Now everybody I knew I would bring this back to books. There's a bookshop in Townsville called the Laurie Hugh Bookshop and it has all the fair trade chocolates that Jennifer's talking about and they are 8 or 9 dollars and my daughters and I made a weekly junket to this bookshop and we'd buy ourselves...