156: Building a Healthy Blog and a Healthy Life with Liz Della Croce

In this interview, we chat with Liz Delacroce about maintaining a healthy lifestyle, both personally and with your business. And I'm going to share a tip about looking at the dark corners of your website. Hey there everybody. This is Bjork Ostrom. You are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast and I'm so excited to share with you today this interview with Liz Delacroce. But before we get into that, I'm going to share a quick tip. As you know, the tip of the week, what we call the Tasty Tip, is brought to you each week by WP Tasty, which is the go to place for bloggers that are running on WordPress and want to optimize different areas of their site. If you go to wptasty.com, you can check out the three different plugins that we have that thousands now thousands of bloggers are using to create a better site in regards to traffic both from Google and Pinterest. And also as well as links, we have a new plugin called Tasty Links which allows you to link a keyword anywhere on your site. We also have Tasty recipes for all you food bloggers, which is a lot of people that listen to this podcast, and Tasty Pins, which allows you to optimize your images on your site, your WordPress site for both Pinterest and search. And every week on the Food Blogger Pro podcast we have a Tasty tip which features a little tip that you can implement that will help you build your business or will help you in general. Sometimes it's not business related, sometimes it's just a mindset or an idea. And today's Tasty Tip is about examining the dark corners of your business, specifically your business website or your blog. And what do I mean by that? Well, we've been going through and updating for gdpr and if you don't know what GDPR is, you can go back and listen to the interview that we did with Danielle Liss from Legal talking about this big change that's happening as the European Union changes some of their rules. And one of the things that made us do that required us to do is think about all of the different services that we use on our website. And we've been doing this long enough where it's, I don't have a running list of the things that we use. So I had to think, okay, I had to sit down and create a list. But even then I don't know if I got to everything. So I used two different sites to examine the unexposed deep dark corners of the website. And they're not bad things. A lot of times you say the dark corners like it's a bad thing, but it's kind of the place that hasn't happened, had light on it for a while, so you don't remember that it's there. It's that service or thing that you integrated into your website that you are maybe using still or maybe not using, but in general, you've just kind of forgot about it. And so I use these two different services. One is called BuiltWith and you can go to builtwith.com and the other is called Similar Tech. And that is@similartech.com and these two services do a similar thing where they show you the different services and apps and integrations that are running on a website. Now, the cool thing about this is you can look up the information for your own website if you need to double check. And that's what we used it for. But it's also a really cool thing that you can do to look at other people. So if you're curious, hey, there's a blogger that you really like or that you're interested in, you think they have a really good business and you want to see what are they running on their website. You can use Built with and Similar Tech to do a little analysis and to learn about that website, both other people's website and as we used it, you could learn about your website as well. If there's some things that you maybe forgot that you're running now, one of the things you can do is you can actually remove services that you no longer need. So maybe you have something on your site, it's running in the background and it's taking up resources. Maybe it's slowing down your site a little bit. You can use these services to remind yourself about that and remove it if you don't need it anymore. So builtwith.com and similartech.com, check those out. You can learn about your site and other sites as well. And that is the tasty tip for this week. All right, for the podcast interview today, we are talking to Liz Delacroce and she's going to be talking about living a healthy lifestyle. And not only what it means to live a healthy lifestyle personally, but also how that translates into being a business owner and to building a blog and how important it is to maintain that healthy lifestyle across the board. And for a lot of you that have been doing this, you know, it's a lot of work. You know that you have to work really hard. And you know that you have to put in some long days, but also you have to balance that to make it sustainable. And Liz is going to talk about how she's done that through the years. So let's go ahead and jump into the interview. Liz, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, I'm excited to be chatting about what I consider to be a really, really important topic. And this was actually one, you know, as we were kind of going back and forth and talking about what we could chat about, this was one of the suggestions you made, this idea of living a healthy lifestyle. And we're going to talk about that holistically. Such an important topic for bloggers and business owners. But before we do that, one of the things we love to do is rewind the tape a little bit and hear about the story for those that aren't familiar with you and your business and your blog. And one of the things I would love to hear a little bit about, Liz, is kind of be before blog, and you had started another journey that kind of coincided with your blog, this journey of healthy living and exercise and eating intentionally. So if you could take us back BB before blog and talk about kicking that off and then how the blog coincided with that.

Sure, absolutely. So, Basically, back in 2006, I was a newlywed. I was 25 years old and working full time in the hospitality industry. So I have a hotel sales background. So I was working for Marriott and a regional sales office, had a great husband, great job with Marriott, the number one hotel company. Everything was good. I was really happy. But long story short, I saw a photo of myself from a wedding and I simply just did not like how I looked. That's something that's interesting is that you can be very healthy by the numbers, but still not necessarily feel your best. So that was really what made me want to make some permanent changes as far as losing weight. Essentially, literally, I just googled, I think I googled like food diary or online food tracker. And from there I started using a program which I still use today, just called myfooddiary.com it's similar to Weight Watchers, except you're tracking calories, not points. And really, it's as simple as tracking my calories every day and making sure I was not eating more than I was burning. Yeah. So that I had a deficit to lose about a pound a week. So that's really all that it. That's where it all started. And that was also the first time I started actually exercising regularly. So I really was not active for the first, you know, 25 years of my life.

Yeah, and so that was. That was in 2006, you said. Yeah, okay, got it. So in terms of exercise, healthy eating, kind of some of the things that you talk about now, you had had a few years of doing that before starting your blog in 2010. So did that tie into the. This journey that you were on in. In healthy living? And as. As we get into it, we're going to talk about healthy living holistically, not just with eating and exercise, but curious to know what. What was the reason for the starting the blog?

Sure. So I ended up losing. After about a couple years, I lost about 40 pounds initially. And whenever you lose a bunch of weight, people want to know what you're eating and what you're doing. Everyone wants to know how you lost the weight. And I've been cooking my entire life. I'm surrounded by a lot of amazing cooks on all sides of my family. So I've been in the kitchen my whole life. And what happens when you're just kind of an inherent cook is that you don't really write down recipes or follow recipes, but I can make things taste good. So a blog was really the best way for me to show other people how to cook the food that I was making. It really forced me to learn how to recipe test and how to write a recipe that others could follow and end up with that same dish. And that was really. It was a way to document what I was eating and what I was doing. And so I also write about different healthy habits as far as fitness, that type of thing, nutrition, you know, why. Why I want to eat whole foods, not processed foods. So the blog was really just the best way for me to help people that were asking what I was doing, because otherwise it was too hard to really explain. And, you know, a quick phone call or. Yeah, meeting, it's.

It's interesting. I think there's a really important takeaway with that, and that is this idea of the market. And we talk about that in kind of broad terms, but essentially it was community. You could view that as a market, and are you trying to push something on them or are they trying to pull something out of you? And for podcast listeners, I think that's an important takeaway. Think about what you are doing, and are you trying to push that or is there a pull? Are you creating something that people are asking you about that they want to know more about? Food Blogger Pro for us was that we had a lot of people in the same situation. That were asking us about it. So I was like, okay, let's see if we can create a solution to this thing that people are trying to pull from us. Instead of trying to say, I have a good idea, I'm going to try and push this on people. So when you started it, did you have this intent of, hey, I want to build this into a business. This is going to be my job.

Right. That's such a great point. So, of course, as you probably know, this was not a job back then. Maybe it was that I wasn't aware of it. So certainly back then, that was not my intention even in the slightest for many more years to come, by the way. So it really was a matter of just purely wanting to. You know, I'm a very passionate, excited person. So I was just really pumped up about it and excited. I love to share and teach and coach. So it was just very natural for me to, you know, I was feeling really happy and good, and I really want others to feel that way too. So that was just my way to help other people, you know, and show to them, like, hey, look, I didn't work out for 25 years. If I can do this, you can do this too. I don't love to work out. I don't love to, you know, this isn't, you know, I'm not a natural athlete. And this was. I don't have, like, there's no one really, like, athletic or super thin on my family on either side. So I don't really even have that DNA advantage. So it just was me being like, hey, look, this. You can do it too. Just wanted to kind of encourage people. But no, this was not intended to be a business. And, you know, that is something that is so different now is that people see that that can happen. Back then, I didn't have. It might have been in business for some people, but I didn't know anybody doing it for many years to come.

Yep, that makes sense. And before we get too far away from it, I'm curious to know, and I'm sure other people are as well. If you were to say to somebody listening, hey, if you are going to start your journey to being healthier physically by what you eat and through exercise, what would your advice be? Them. So somebody that would maybe be in a similar situation to where you were, where they haven't exercised before and they want to kind of make a change and, you know, shift things a little bit, how would you encourage that individual?

Sure. So I think I'd give two pieces of advice. One for the exercise side, one for the nutrition side. Because it is, you know, two parts, I would say as far as exercise, find something that you enjoy doing so that you want to do it versus doing something just because you know that magazine says you need to be running every day on the treadmill. So for me it was group exercise. I love that group atmosphere, the music, the instructors were very motivational. So that was what worked for me. I found that group atmosphere to work. But it could be tennis, it could be running with a friend every day around the lake nearby. Find what you like to do and play around until you find it. Because then what happens is you're going to actually look forward to that workout because of how good it felt. And I think that if you, if you don't like something, you're not going to want to keep doing it.

Yeah, it's such a, it's such a good reminder. But it's so true. That makes sense.

I know. And none of it's like rocket science, but I think that when you're just starting off like for me it was like I got to go on the elliptical for an hour. That was boring for me. And the other thing too is this is advice for people that want to make the long term change, not just like a short term, for like a short term goal. I really want people to live a long term, healthy life. On the nutrition side, my best advice would be to of course take it one day at a time and think long term. So I'm a big fan of finding ways to live a healthy lifestyle and eat a healthy diet you can maintain for long periods of time. So Things like Whole 30 or Super Intense programs like Paleo diet or fasting, while those things are successful for many people, they're very rigid. And in general humans don't have that type of self control or long term, you know, that's hard. Don't make it hard on yourself, make it easy on yourself. So for me, what I like about programs that I use where every, any food account, it allows for real life. Because here's what's going to happen. One day you're going to go to a birthday party and it's going to be cake. One day your kid's going to want you to go out for ice cream with him or you're going to have to eat dinner at a certain time. You can't fast half the day, or a friend's going to have a bachelorette party, whatever it might be. The thing is with life is that you're not always eating at home where you can control everything. So I like the idea, again, I'm talking about long term weight loss, keep off forever. I like the idea of not eliminating entire food groups only because that's hard to do for the rest of your life.

Mm. Yeah. There's something about the sustainability of what you're doing and we talk about that as it relates to creating a business or a blog or a brand or whatever you'd want to call it and how you can do these short sprints and you can, you know, work the comparable in the, in the, the blog space would be you can, you know, you can work 16 hour days for short sprints. But it's also important to think about what are you going to be able to do over a long period of time. 5 years, 6 years, 7 years, 10 years? Years. Because so often it takes a long period of time and commitment. Showing up every day and not being perfect. You're not going for 100% but just long term commitment over on a, focusing in, on one thing over a long period of time and the impact that that can have. So let's do this now. So we talked a little bit about your story, about your background and we're going to be talking about healthy living today, which we talked about kind of a section of that. But if we expand up beyond that, when think of healthy living and a healthy lifestyle as it relates to you living life as a blogger, having a family, what does that look like? How would you define healthy lifestyle?

Sure. So I think this is where it'll vary based on, you know, your priorities, your goals in life, you know, probably your upbringing, all sorts of different things. So for me, it's about having a balance between what's important to me. So of course my family, of course my career is important to me, my friends are really important to me, and then my health is really important to me. So those are the four things that I'm constantly trying to juggle and balance. And it takes a conscious effort to do that. Because a good example with us is that many of us and many of your listeners, we do what we do because it's a passion and we love to do it. So unlike a desk job where you, you know, A, might not love it, B, you leave the building at the end of each day, it's hard. You could, I mean, I could work all day on the London Bowl. I love what I do. I love to cook, I love to, you know, I love every aspect of my business. So I could potentially do that for hours and hours on End. But that's not healthy.

Yeah. And the interesting thing is, even though it's something that you enjoy and you want to be doing, that doesn't always mean that doing it is a healthy thing. So do you have an example of what that looks like when you say, I could do it all day, but it's not necessarily a healthy thing? What does that look like, that battle as you're trying to figure that out in real life?

Absolutely. So let's see here. One aspect of my job that I love is I do travel writing and I write wellness travel stories. So I try to encourage people to. I want to show people that you can travel a lot and still maintain your healthy lifestyle. So I like to show them, you know, ways to travel and still eat all the great food, but stay active while you travel. And I love that side of my business. I could research destinations or plan those trips or research different activities or recreational offerings all day long, but at the end of the day, also really need to make time to work out every day. I need to make time to spend time with my two little kids every day. I need to make time to spend my husband. So it's kind of one of those things where, you know, in the long term, you know, the business, like they always say, who's going to be at your bedside in the hospital? It's kind of that mentality of, you know, for me, I want to make time to have lunch with a friend or to call a friend or to see a friend. So the thing of it is though, is you have to make time for these things. Same thing with, like making time time cook a healthy dinner. I know so many bloggers that they cook all day, but then they literally are eating cookies out of a box for their own dinner.

Yep.

And trust me, it's happened to all of us. I don't do cookies on my blog, but it would be something equivalently bad for me, like humus dip or something.

Yes, for sure.

I totally get it. But I think that that's why you have to plan ahead and be intentional because it isn't going to just automatically happen.

Yeah. And so when you say make time for things, and I think people can relate to that, it's friends, it's family, it's self care. And I think we would all agree, hey, it's important to make time for these things, and yet it's such a hard thing to do. So if somebody is listening and they're like, man, I know that I need to make time for these things, what does that look like in a really concrete way, how do you do that successfully? And while also, and I think this is the key and the hard thing, while also working really hard on your business.

Correct. So, okay. And so here's a big point I want to make. And I learned this many, many years ago at a food conference from Steamy Kitchen when she was speaking about how you define success. And one thing that she basically pointed out to me is that obviously money isn't the only definition of success. And so whereas we all love what we do. And like, I'm very business oriented, as I'm sure many of your listeners are, if they're listening to this type of podcast. It can be so. It can be so intriguing to want to invest all your time on growing your business and, you know, of course, growing your assets and growing financially your wealth. But for me, that's a good example of like, for example, the travel side of my blog is not the most lucrative side of my blog, but it is the most, you know, as far as money, cash, but it's the most lucrative to me as far as the reward I get from travel. So same thing with like, you know, making time to be, to work out again. You know, you might, it might be more intriguing to want to work on a business project or make a pitch for something because it's. You're looking for that growing your business and the wealth, but investing in your body is going to pay off equally as well. And again, I guess we all do define success differently, but for me, I think that a successful person isn't going to be defined by their bank account.

Yes. And one of the things that Lindsey and I sometimes talk about, and this came from when I was working at the nonprofit that I was at, and somebody came and spoke from Target Corporate, and he was an executive at Target Corporate, and he said one of the things that's most important for you to realize is the massive amount of emotional income that you receive from this job. And it introduced to me a different use of the word income. And so when we think about what we do to kind of neutralize that word income and remove it from money, we think about emotional income, physical income, relational income, there's career income, but all of those things are different types of income. And one of the hard things about what we do is that we live and work in a space that has very tangible metrics around certain types of income or stats, like statistics and metrics, whereas, like, your connection to your significant other has no metric other than how you are generally feeling about it.

Right.

And so I think it's, it's a really important point that you make in that we need to consider kind of those other spokes of the wheel and make sure that none of them get too big in order to have it be a bumpy ride. But that's, that's really hard to do. So when you look at a week or you look at a month and you look at the amount of time that you have, how do you go about scheduling that? Are you saying, hey, anytime my family calls, I pick up the phone? Any friend related lunch I always take? Or are you selective in scheduling that? How do you fit in workouts? What does that look like?

Right. So for me, one thing that I do as I work, I really do try to work really efficiently. And I've built in different systems that allow me to, to work officially so that I have the time freed up to do things like get to the gym, make time for social activities, make time for my kids, t ball game, et cetera, et cetera. And so for example, I do everything, I've been doing things in batches for a long time now. So for example, I hired a photographer about three years ago and we photograph all of our recipes for the blog in two days a month. So that's just one example of like a practical way, you know, that has helped me free up time. Whereas before I was, you know, photographing much more sporadically or much more frequently and that was less efficient. And additionally, because when you're batch working, you're already in that mode and you know this. And I feel like it's more common these days, but you know, when you're in the mode of cooking, it's a lot easier to cook six recipes in a day versus if you're doing it here and there. You gotta get everything out, get everything ready. You're checking emails in between, you're less efficient. So I, for example, write all of my blog posts for the week and one afternoon, now again, I'm not editing the photo so that again, I've created these small systems to help me with that so that I can have that time freed up. Another thing that I do is when I am working on certain tasks, I don't stop to check social media, I don't stop to respond to emails. I really wait to complete that task at hand. You know, a blog post is coming to my mind because that's something that I do pretty commonly, but it could be going through a really big contract for a client or, you know, even if it's something like conference calls with clients. If I have to have a bunch of calls in a week, I try to do them all in one day or, you know what I mean? And that way I'm not breaking up five days of the week. It's just one day. It's pretty much, you know, I, you know, one day is focused to those calls. So it's all about blocking out time and doing things in chunks like that. I think that's really helpful.

Yeah, they talk about task switching and how impactful that that is. And when I say they, I don't know who they is, but I just know in, in general, this idea of task switching being such a hard thing to do efficiently, it's hard to switch and do something. You know, whether that being, whether that be, you know, if you use Slack, which is something that we use internally, somebody asks a question, you're in the middle of something, you switch, there's kind of this on ramp into that task and then an off ramp into another task as you wind that one down. But what does that look like for you? You know, social media, email, that stuff is really easy to get distracted by and to, you know, I'm just gonna check real quick, that kind of thing. So do you have to log out? Are you using any special type of app that says, you know, hey, with when this is open, nothing else is running in the background or what does that look like?

So the only thing I do is I have the notifications turned off on my iPhone, so I don't do anything too crazy. I know there are some amazing, you know, apps and things out there like websites that you can turn off. Getting onto Facebook, I have, I'll admit I have pretty good self control, which also I think helped me, you know, lose weight. Like I can turn down a brownie. So I just want to be upfront. I do have decent self control, but there are so many tools that will literally like, you know, you can set times to be able to access Facebook.

Yeah.

The other thing I was telling you before is now that I have kids, like even right now, I'm paying a sitter to watch my kids right now. So when you're paying someone by the clock, I think maybe that's my inspiration not to go on social media because.

I don't want to be working direct cost to it. Yeah, right.

It's like that direct incentive. Here's the other thing is I only have a sitter four hours a day, so I don't typically work before noon. I typically only work from noon to 4 so, for example, I schedule because you had asked as well. How does that look like for making time? One thing I do every Sunday is I add my workouts for the week to my calendar. Like, it's just like, it's like a podcast interview. Just like it's a doctor's appointment, just like it's anything else very important. That workout is equally important to me and I will protect that time, like, so fiercely, just like I would protect, you know, something else important to me. And I think at the end of the day, everybody makes time for what's important to them. And so unfortunately, what that means is that you have to take responsibility for your health, which is tough because we love to find other people to blame. And I'm not, I'm not inventing this idea. I listen to a lot of, you know, different podcasts. But, you know, I think that that's the thing with your health. The only one that's going to take care of your health is you. You're not. Not your boss, not your employer, not your sister, not your brother. I mean, no one else can do that. So again, to make it easy for me, I literally just make an appointment in my calendar and. And it's in there. And then that way I make it easy for myself. I don't to think about it each day.

Yeah, I think that's great. And I think the. To tie that into your thought on batching, it sounds like what you do is sit down and say, okay, this week, when is this going to happen? And so you're taking this kind of holistic, high level look at your week and saying, what? What does it look like? And how can I fit in the most important, important things? And I'm in the middle of reading this book called Getting Things Done, and I actually just watched a course on Linda as well. And he talks about this idea of the weekly review. And it sounds like that's kind of one of the things that you're doing is this like fitness weekly review where you say, okay, where is this stuff going to fit in? And how is this going to be a part of my week? And I think people don't use their calendar as much as they could. It's such a valuable resource to be able to build around and to place your priorities and to schedule those priorities.

Yeah, absolutely.

So one of the things that you had talked about was this idea of a shorter day. So you have somebody who's coming and you have a sitter from 12 to 4. You have this limited amount of time. You're not going to go and check out Instagram, even if they just released a new app and it's Instagram TV and it's all the, you know, everybody's talking about it, you're sitting down, you're doing your work. And my guess is that you have some clarity around the things that are most important and you prioritize those things. So what are those things that you prioritize in that block of time that you have?

Sure. So I do use my calendar for my day every day. Even my husband and I use it on the weekends for personal things. And that's just our way to your point of using that calendar to your advantage. And it avoids a lot of that downtime of trying to figure out what to do. So typically I will use my calendar, for example, of course, the basic things like conference calls and things like that. I only schedule them between the hours of noon and 4. And I'll also do it the same thing with blog posts. And this brings up a good point. I do a lot. So when I first had my kids, I polled a bunch of working at home moms, and I wrote a blog post about working from home with small kids because a lot of bloggers have kids. They have lots of kids. I mean, many of them have four or six kids. So I was like, what are they doing? And my friend Amelia with eating made easy, made this great point to me about basically reactive work versus proactive work. So, for example, you know, reactive work would be responding to emails or responding to, you know, a slack question, or, you know, you're responding to stuff versus, I don't know if proactive is the right word, but it's like you're not responding. You're actually doing work. So, for example, creating content. So creating a blog post, creating photography, creating whatever it is that you create, a podcast, a podcast episode, you know, whatever it is, and basically batching those up. And so, for example, if you are working around your kids, you know, do that, do the reactive stuff then. But what I was leading into is that I also work at least one afternoon a weekend. And the reason that weekends are great, because guess what doesn't happen on the weekends. No one's emailing you. So most people I work with, whether it's my clients or my employers or different colleagues, most people aren't reaching out to me on the weekends. So I do a lot of my writing and content creation on the weekends when I'm not going to get interrupted with like an urgent need or a contract that needs to be signed or you Know what I mean?

Yep. Yep. It's a calmer time where there's less likelihood of those interruptions coming in.

Exactly.

Yep. And I've heard people talk about that, too. Some people that try and get into that important work early in the day or maybe later in the evening where it's a little bit quieter, and they know that the likelihood of being interrupted is a lot smaller because people aren't going to be doing work at that time or most people aren't going to be. That makes a lot of sense. So let's say that you were to go back and you were to go back to the beginning of when you were starting your site and building things up. What would you do a little bit differently? Would there be things that you would change in terms of the approach that you have now versus the approach that you had when you first started, knowing that you have some clarity around the things that are most important in the. In the things that you want to prioritize?

Sure. You know, it's funny, when I get asked this question, I always say I wouldn't do anything different because I think that's really how you learn the best. But that's not very helpful, is it? So I think. I think the biggest thing that I did, like about two years in was just creating a content calendar, which is so obvious, but that was a big thing that really did help me become less sporadic as far as my content creation. Just kind of setting that schedule of when you're publishing content and the set time. So I think that's the biggest thing. And then, you know, beyond that, I would say, obviously it would have been great if I had hired a photographer and worked in batches sooner. You know, that would have been amazing. But, you know, things cost money and, you know, you can't always do all that right away. So there's something to be said for a slow organic growth. But, you know, people are going a lot faster these days. So I would say I encourage people to enlist help. So another thing, for example, is I have a social media coordinator. So that is something that I. You know, I'm so glad I started doing that many years ago. And that would be something to start sooner. Also, basically, look at where your genius zone is. My zone of genius, I call it, and what really needs your inherent skills and abilities and what really needs your expertise and where do you really shine? And then the other areas of the business enlist help. And that could even be free help from your spouse to start.

Sure. And just out of curiosity, what is that for you and then what are the things that you've brought other people in to help with?

Sure. So my creative genius zone is recipe development and cooking. I love to cook, so that's for sure. It. The other side would be I love interacting with my clients and establishing relationships. I love the whole client interaction. So I, for example, would probably not ever want to hire, at least no time soon, an agent. I really like building those relationships. That's probably because of my sales background, that type of thing. So I really like that client communications. And I love the content creation as far as recipe development, things like that. And I also love leading a team and I love teaching and that type of thing. So I love managing others. So I hired like, I have a social media coordinator, so she handles the social media scheduling, engaging with the Facebook community, Pinterest management, things like that. And then, you know, graphics and video editing. She does that also because those are areas I'm not. I don't love to edit videos, I don't love to design graphics, and I don't love to schedule pins. So. And here's the other thing, too. I used to do all of those things, to be clear. But when I had kids, I decided I would rather spend time with my. My kids from, you know, 6:00am to noon every day than rush to my desk to schedule the tweets out to schedule the Facebook post.

Yeah. And that was. That was going to be one of the questions that I wanted to ask you to hear your thoughts on. Because, you know, as we talk about healthy lifestyle, it's contrasted with this phrase that exists in the world of hustle as it relates to building a business. And I think sometimes those come head to head and it's like healthy lifestyle versus hustle. And for people that have been doing this as long as we have, which is around the. The same time, kind of 2010ish. Um, I think we have the, the ability in a way that other people who are just starting don't have in that we can talk about healthy lifestyle. Because we did have a phase of hustle where maybe things weren't as healthy. At least I feel like that's true for myself. Where there's. There's a. There's a many, many years. It's. I suppose that's relative. I would say two to four years, kind of varying. Where it's like I was working a lot at odd hours on weekends, and we had another job, we didn't have kids, but it was still kind of this hustle idea that allowed us to get to a Point where it's like, okay, we can bring people on to help and live more of what would be a healthy lifestyle or more of a normal lifestyle. So do you feel like that existed for you? Do you think there's truth in that? Or do you, do you think, hey, if you're starting out, you can still have this healthy lifestyle if you are intentional.

Okay, I'm so glad you asked that because I remember when I was just starting, I would get so frustrated at conferences because all these bloggers would give all these ideas and to your point, they were based on where they're at and it is very different depending on your stage. So here's my thing. I was living a healthy lifestyle when I just started because that was really, you know, again I had just lost, you know, a bunch of weight after my first kid. I lost 20 pounds more to make it a 60 pound total weight loss. So I was working really hard. But here's the thing that I did that might be a little bit different than others listening potentially. So I am not a huge. I'm not really looking to race anyone to the finish line. I'm okay. I don't know that I'm the biggest hustler. I'm not going to say I don't work hard or that I'm not business minded or I don't want my business to grow. But I'm not looking to like race anyone to the finish. So I had very slow growth. I was never looking to become, you know, a huge blogger, whatever that means. I was never, you know, looking to get to a certain point. I really encourage people to enjoy the ride and I want that to really stand out. Enjoy the ride, enjoy where you're at now. Don't constantly think, think if I get X, Y or Z then I'll be happy or if I reach that. Because the thing of it is you need to enjoy every stage of it because every stage has its own problem. So, you know, issues that I had at the beginning I don't have. Like for example, I can afford a photographer now. That's wonderful. But at the end of the day, now I'm also managing another person. There's more work to that. So there's pros and cons to every level. You know, the more I remember having my first contract and it was with three different activations and I was like freaked out that I was going to forget something. Well, now I have a million contact now I have so much work and a million deadlines and a million contracts. The thing of it is, you Just enjoy where you're at and then trust that you will grow as your business grows, so your capacity to take on more work will grow, your capacity to take on more day to day issues will grow. But don't try to force it, don't try to push it, don't try to race it. And the same thing goes for weight loss. You've got to just trust the process, be patient and enjoy the ride.

Yeah, I think that's great. And I think it's a really important mindset to have as you think about just life in general can be applied to many different things.

Oh yeah.

The idea of showing up every day and feeling like the things that you are doing are sustainable and enjoyable and there will absolutely be times when they will be sprints and it will be hard, it will be difficult, but as much as possible, finding ways to make your day to day sustainable and enjoyable. And I think what you said is so important, this idea of not trying to race to the finish line because there isn't one there. It just, it goes on, it goes on forever. And like you said, it's not like you ever get to a point where then problems go away. They will always be there and in some ways they'll just be amplified and your responsibilities become more so. Enjoy the process and enjoy yourself as you walk through that journey.

Someone that said these are the good old days, well, guess what? So these are the good old days.

Yes, yes, for sure.

You're going to look back and be like, oh, those were the good old days. Yes, we're in the good old days right now.

Yes, it's that. There's that country song, Remember when Do you know that? No, we did. I forget. There's going to be people who know it right away. It's an Alan Jackson song and we did with our team, we were like, hey, what's here? What's the one song that. That you remember? And that one came up. This was, this was a few years back, but that one came up. I was like, oh, remember when? So we'll link to that in the show notes as a song for everybody to check out. But it's kind of that idea. Liz, I feel like that's a great note to end on and really inspiring for people that are listening and a good reminder. So before we go though, can you tell people where they can can connect with you and find you online?

Absolutely. So you can find me anywhere at the LemonBull. T H E L E M O N B O W L so any social media platform or you know, lizardlumble.com say hi.

Nice. Yep, Makes it easy. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast, Liz.

Thanks for having me.

Hey, hey. Lovely listeners. Alexa here bringing you the reviewer of the week. And this one comes from BET from betondinner.com and it says my food blog is still pretty new and more of a fun hobby than anything. I have two young kids and the thought of being able to make an income from writing and cooking seems too good to be true. I love that this podcast has valuable ideas and encouragement for someone like me who is in the beginning it's just a dream learning curve phase, but that it gives me a window into this whole business side of blogging. I love to learn and it's been awesome to be able to do that by listening while I fold laundry during nap time or if I'm in the car all by myself. Thanks.

Thanks.

Well, thank you bet. That was such a great review. And for anyone listening, if you would like to get your name and blog featured in this section of an upcoming episode of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast, all you need to do is leave a review on itunes. Go to itunes, search for the Food Blogger Pro podcast, and then leave a review for us. We would love to see what you think. Thank you again for tuning in this week. We appreciate you so much and from all of us here at fbphq, make it a great week.