My Love/Hate Relationship with Exercise

Actually the title of this post is a lie.  I don’t have a love/hate relationship with exercise.  It’s just pure hatred.  I simply do not enjoy any form of exercise.  Never have.  So I knew this part of the program would be very difficult for me.  I didn't do anything for about the first six weeks Rachel started cooking for me.  But I knew that to lose weight, diet and exercise go hand-in-hand, so I started walking.

Walking

I spent about a month just walking.  I started at 30 minutes, then slowly increased it to an hour. We have a lot of annoying hills around our house, so the walks included a lot of hills, which made it feel like much more of a workout.  After about a month of that, though, I knew it just wasn’t enough and I was getting bored.  I thought maybe a change of scenery would help, so I started going to a local lake that has the quarter miles all marked out and makes it easy to track how far you are walking.  After doing that for a few weeks, I decided to add an ever-so-slight jog into the mix.  I’d walk a quarter mile, then jog a quarter mile, then walk a quarter, then jog a quarter.  At first, I couldn’t do more than the two quarters total of jogging (and even then, they were split up with a quarter mile of walking), but I kept at it.  I can’t say I really had a goal in mind at the time.  It just seemed like a good way to ramp up the workout a bit.

Running

Then one day, out of nowhere, I ran a half mile straight.  I have to admit, I was shocked.  I didn’t tell anyone at first because I didn’t want to ever have to repeat it.  But it made me curious.  I wondered if I could really work up to running, say, a mile.  A week later, I did.  I stayed at a mile for a couple weeks, then slowly started adding quarters to it.  Then I was at two miles straight.  As of this week, I’m at 2.5 miles.  With this last run, I experienced what I’ve often heard my husband, who is a runner, talk about: the runner’s high.  After the first 1.25 miles, I suddenly got this burst of energy.  I wasn’t breathing heavy anymore and it felt like I was on a fresh pair of legs.  I just kept going.  And now I do have a goal:  I want to run a 5K. 

Strength Training

Living in a house with a bunch of workout nuts (my husband has been faithfully working out for as long as I’ve known him, and I’ve known him for 32 years), I knew that running alone wasn’t enough.  I was going to have to add strength conditioning to it.  I knew I would have to join the gym…yet again.  I think this is my fourth or fifth time of joining the gym.  Like I said, I just don’t enjoy working out and always end up cancelling my membership.  Part of the problem was not really knowing what to do there.  I know how all the machines work (after all, I am an experienced gym-quitter), but after awhile it just gets so repetitive and boring. 

Enter Daughter #2.

It just so happens that my second child, Erika, was recently hired at the gym our family attends (and the one I’ve quit on several occasions) as a Personal Trainer.  Working out is a bit of an obsession with her.  Well, she wouldn’t say it’s an obsession, but in my mind, anyone who willingly goes to the gym two times a day is clearly obsessed.  So not only did I re-join (or is that re-re-re-re-join) the gym, but I hired Erika as my Personal Trainer.  We do a lot of weird exercises that I would have never thought to do and my legs pretty much hate her when we’re done, but it has given me a new take on the gym and I am excited to see how long I stick around this time!

So now you have the backstory, the What I Eat story, and the Exercise story.   As I am fond of saying lately:  “How does Mom lose weight?  It takes a Village!”