A Day on the Links: Health Edition

Recently, some of the romance readers and writers on Twitter have formed a diet club.  I didn't join but the project did get me thinking about my own health.

I could stand to be healthier (who couldn't?) and I often rely on the internet for information regarding my health choices.  For instance, there are tons of diet and healthy cooking sites out there.  So I thought that this week, I would share some of the great ones I've found.  Now let's all get off the computer and go jogging!

Live Strong: This website is the dot com version of the Lance Armstrong Foundation's dot org site dedicated to supporting people living with cancer.  This site is all about diet, nutrition and exercise.  Living healthy, in other words.  I often check it out for calorie and nutrition statistics on foods I'm thinking about eating (the figures can be shocking!) but the site offers a ton more in terms of information and inspiration.

Delish: When I have the time, I love to cook.  Knowing what goes into every bite I eat is frequently impossible but when I stand over the stove myself, I can monitor every drop of oil and every fresh ingredient.  Plus, I think my own cooking tastes pretty good. This is one of the best websites I've found for healthy recipes that don't take a ton of time or skill to make.

Good Housekeeping:  Yes, I know: the title of this magazine and website alone is enough to make you think you may be several decades too young for their advice.  Not true.  The health and diet section of their site has inspirational stories of women who've lost an amazing amount of weight as well as fun health and diet tools like a Diet Matchmaker and Cravings 911.  Definitely worth a peek.

Sex and Chocolate

Food and sex are often paired together.  Not surprisingly, since they both fulfill a primal urge.  But in romance novels, we don't often read about what the heroine is eating for breakfast or whether the hero is trying to start eating more healthily.

I've often heard some good advice about writing, which is that every major scene should satisfy every sense.  Touch, smell, sight, sound and taste.  Yet we so seldom get around to taste.  The salty tang of sweaty flesh.  Dark rich chocolate dribbled over...  No, sorry, I meant food.

In my own romance manuscripts, dramatic moments can take place in restaurants or parties where I try to describe a dish to demonstrate both the atmosphere of the restaurant -- seared ahi tuna conjures up linen napkins versus barbecue chicken wings, which screams brightly coloured paper ones -- and sets the tone for the characters.  A meat-and-potatoes man may be a wholesome cowboy while a rare steak and asparagus with hollandaise sauce gentleman might be a top notch businessman.

For my heroines, the decisions are a little trickier.  No heroine wants to diet on the page, so that means no salads as main courses or skipping out on dessert.  Mmm...dessert.

Nothing can ratchet up the tension growing between the main characters more than a sinfully decadent final course.  Chocolate.  Cherries.  Whipped cream.  They all evoke sensuality.  And they're all precursors for a night of passionate lovemaking.

So try bringing that fifth sense into your writing.  Salty, sweet, bitter or sour, our sense of taste should also be exercised while we read a toothsome romance novel, even if it's only to make us drool.  And beware the hero or heroine who declines dessert.  We won't be having them over for dinner again.

Photo courtesy of savit keawtavee at freedigitalphotos.net