In today's episode I'm giving an update on my hiatus from this podcast and YouTube channel, my modified media fast, the projects I completed since we last spoke, and a look at what I'm thinking about for 2024. (: 

Links to the various and sundry things mentioned in this episode:

My Newsletter

Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way on Amazon

The Laid Back Guide to Weight Loss Maintenance

Overcoming Weight Loss Obstacles

The Swamps of Dorscha (Book II in the Forgotten Portal series)

Intermittent Fasting Workbook

Slow and Steady Success Academy

Become an Insider on Youtube

Discord Server Subscription

Video: Intermittent Fasting During the Holidays

Interivew on Justin Dorff's Channel

 

AI Generated Transcript of this Podcast Episode
Welcome to the Six Miles to Supper podcast. I'm your host, Kayla Cox, and I've lost over £80 with intermittent fasting six days a week, eating whatever I wanted at my meals, taking a cheat day every Sunday and walking six miles a day. And I'm here to help you on your weight loss journey. On this episode, we're going to talk about all the things I've been up to since I've been on hiatus from this podcast.

 
First of all, I would like to say I'm sorry, I forgot to update you and let you know that I was on hiatus from this podcast. I realized today as I was going through the last podcast that I recorded, I really listened to it because I thought, surely I said, you know, I'm going on hiatus, but I didn't do that.

 
So if you are not subscribed to my newsletter and you don't watch my YouTube, you might have been wondering where I was. And by the way, if you'd like to subscribe to my newsletter or if you're interested in any of the things that I'm going to be talking about, you can find the links in the show notes for this episode.

 
The newsletter is really the best way to kind of keep up with what I'm doing because there are so many different places where I'm active that is easy for me to forget to update one. So in mid-September, I started looking around at my life and looking at, you know, how things went this past year and kind of thinking about what kind of direction I wanted to head in 2024.

 
And I realized I had all these projects that were sitting there, unfinished things I had been working on but had never really, you know, got them to the finish line. And so I thought, you know, I really want to finish these things by the end of the year. I knew that I couldn't continue doing the same schedule I had been doing and still try to finish these things.

 
I had already tried that and it had not worked. And that's the definition of insanity. Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. So I decided to go on a modified media fast. So if you've never read the excellent book by Julia Cameron called The Artist Way, you may not know what a media fest is, but a media farce is basically taking a break from consuming other people's creativity.

 
Now she recommends a seven day strict media fest, meaning for seven days straight, you don't read anything written by anyone else. You don't listen to music. You don't consume anybody else's creativity. And and it's a very great exercise. I highly recommend it to anybody. But I knew that that kind of strict fasting wasn't going to be sustainable for the amount of time that I guessed that this was going to take.

 
Now, I was a little bit wrong in how long I thought this media fest would go on. I thought really I would be done. Maybe, you know, after a month and then after I kind of got into it, I thought, well, maybe it'll be more like Halloween. As it turned out, it was mid-November before I was finished. And quite frankly, I'm still trying to get caught up and really restarted back on those things that I wanted to do.

 
For example, this is the first podcast episode I've created since the Media Fest was over. So what was I doing on the media Fest? How did I do it and why did I do it? So the way I decided to modify it fast, which is very much like how I modify regular fasting for weight loss purposes. You know, for me I was thinking about long term, okay, you know, I think this is going to happen for at least a month, maybe longer.

 
So what can I really stick with? Because sticking with it was a lot more important to me than, you know, having super strict rules and trying to be a perfectionist. So I decided for myself that Monday through Saturday, I was not going to consume other people's creativity just in general. That meant no reading except for the Bible and the Phillip Clear.

 
I didn't allow myself to listen to any podcast or watch any YouTube videos or watch any kind of TV or anything like that. The only exceptions to that were on date night and on Sleep on the Couch Night, which is the family movie night we have on Saturday nights. At that point, I would, you know, watch a movie with them.

 
And then on Sunday, I would just I wouldn't seek out creativity from other people. But if it happened to be on, I would watch it. So, for example, if my husband flipped on the TV on Sunday, I would sit there and watch it with him because it was important to me to spend time with him and not to just like leave the room because he wanted to watch TV.

 
And I also went on hiatus from creating new topical videos for YouTube and for creating podcasts for this podcast. So I did continue to do my weekly lives for my YouTube members on Wednesdays at noon, and I do one also just for the general YouTube public on Fridays at noon. And so I did those. I continued to those and I continued to do the vlog for members.

 
Also, but I didn't create other types of topical videos because, you know, the vlogs are unedited and so are the lives like alive. I just sit down, do the thing and then I'm done. Same with the vlog, just record it. I don't edit and then I just, you know, pop it on YouTube. But when I do a topical video that that's like a lot more work, you know, like I have to rehearse it, I have to outline it.

 
I have to be, you know, I have to go through it a lot and then I record it and then I edited it and then, you know, it's just this whole big long process. So I knew that I could continue to do those things, but that if I tried to do the topical videos and things like that, I would just not get done with these other projects so that those were my rules.

 
So I did this because I knew that if I did not create this kind of set of rules for myself, I would just never finish these projects. And these projects were important to me for various reasons. So let's talk about the projects I did and what that looked like. So the first project was finishing the laid back guide to Weight Loss Maintenance.

 
This is a book that I actually started in May of 2019, so four and a half years ago. So I had just written The Laid Back Guide to Intermittent Fasting and a very kind reader reached out and they had really enjoyed the book and they said, You know, the next book you should write is a book on maintenance because nobody writes books about maintenance, you know, And so I think that's what you should write next.

 
And I thought that's yeah, that's a really great idea. But I was totally intimidated by the idea of writing a book about maintenance. And also I felt like I needed more experience with maintenance. I felt very confident about weight loss itself with intermittent fasting, but I felt like, you know, I need to experience more of the maintenance because maintenance is where I always have failed.

 
Now, at that point I had maintained my initial £65 loss. I had done that for a year before I lost more weight. But then, you know, there was that year where I was losing more weight and I kind of felt like that didn't quite count as maintenance because when you're actively trying to lose weight, that's a different process than just trying to maintain your weight loss.

 
So I thought, you know, I really want to I want to maintain for a while longer before I really work on this book. So instead, I wrote another book called Overcoming Weight Loss Obstacles. And then I thought, I'll just put the maintenance book on the backburner. And so then I went back to it. After a while, I finally thought, you know, I feel like I could start writing this book again.

 
But I just kept working on it and working on it. And then I got it earlier this year in to kind of draft format, you know, like I felt like the the format was basically where I wanted it to be. But the way I write a book is basically I sometimes I outline, but then I kind of write the first draft and then I'll let it sit for a while and then I'll reread it and then I'll do a second draft.

 
And then more and more and more drafts until I finally get it to where I want it to be. And then at that point, I will read it out loud over and over and over and over again until I feel like it's exactly what I want to say. Or at least it said in the best way I know how to say it.