Self Portrait Saturday: 2 months!

it’s true
I do
have a cold
(already getting old)
I won’t complain much. Instead,
I’ll be grateful- so far it’s all in my head.

~*~

 

 

 

I’m up to an hour on the elliptical. On Tuesday I did 75 minutes and got up to 5.65 miles. Yay me! 🙂

 

Self portrait Saturday: one month done

So, I’ve been going to the gym every day that my son has school. That makes four weeks so far. 🙂

If we were relying on weight as an indicator, we’d be sorely disappointed. However, since we can feel and see ourselves deflating and getting stronger we are not disappointed at all.

(Don’t ask us why we started talking in third person plural. Perhaps we are royalty.)

I had to stop using the treadmill because I have wimpy feet and they really started hurting. So I decided to try the elliptical machine. The first time I tried it I could only do 5 minutes before my thighs started screaming, “Get off! Get off!”

The second time I tried it I managed ten minutes. Then each day I tick it up a tiny bit. This was the first time I did a mile. Wahoo!

And then I managed 2 miles on the evilliptical. It really is evil. But effective and so far doesn’t seem to bother my wussy feet too badly. So that’s good.

I’ll let you in on a secret:

Fat people are strong.

Our muscles are completely accustomed to carrying around a lot of weight. So, if we can maintain that strength as we lose weight, then we will be amazingly strong smaller sized people.  Like most people, and especially women, I have noodle arms. But I was excited to see that my legs are kinda badass. So is my back/core area because I can do the machine where you do a sit up pushing back against a weight behind you and I don’t really even feel it until I get up around 140 pounds. so, yay me!

I also want to say that this would not at all be possible without the support of my headphones. Since I generally don’t want to hear what is playing an the TV.

I’ll finish up here by posting a couple pictures that I took of myself when I was trying to take a close up picture of my eye. That’s harder than it sounds.

 

 

Oh and this….same old, same old. 🙂

Self Portrait Saturday: The Truth

I drop my son off at school and head over to the gym. Right now I walk a mile on the treadmill and then do some stuff on the weight machines if I’m not too conked. This being the first week of school and this exercising thing, I’m not too worried about the second part. The mile is required, though.

Finally remembered my headphones so that I can drown out the TV and other gym goers.

This is my pouffy hair. 🙂

These are my new shoes for this endeavor.

This is the starting place.

The thing we don’t talk about, right?

I’m not obsessed with this, but it is a factor. My goal is to get fit and strong.

Right now I am not so fit and strong. And inertia is a bitch.

Law I: Every body persists in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by force impressed

But I will make her work for me not against me.

Inertia will be my bitch.

😀

Self Portrait Saturday. ON A SATURDAY!

 

 

 

Joined a gym.

Found out I shouldn’t eat dairy.

Goal: Get fit.

 

Fat. and other bad words.

People are obsessed with being skinny. This is not surprising given our unrealistic, media driven culture. I don’t want to be skinny. Personally I find very skinny people look unhealthy and wish that they would eat a bit more. The other part of wanting to be skinny is driven by the health industry. We all know how much more healthy it is not to carry too much weight. Honestly, you’d have to live in a cave not to have heard of all the dangers of being heavy. I in no way dispute that. That’s why my goal is to become more fit and strong and get down to a more healthy weight.

But that doesn’t make it okay for people to bandy about words like fat or obese.

I’ve heard Oprah say that it’s one of the last things it’s okay to discriminate against. I agree that many people seem to be harshly judgmental about overweight people and fairly callous in their use of words about it. If you wouldn’t walk up to them and talk about their fatness or obesity, then don’t, please, talk to me about it. Or talk around me about it. If you wouldn’t walk up and talk to me about my weight, then please don’t talk to anyone else about it. If you can engage me (or them) in a respectful dialogue about your concerns about my (their) health, then you’ve done a lot more to promote healthy behaviors than ever will be accomplished by name calling.

And that’s what it is.

Name Calling.

Maybe you say obese because that is a medical term and that makes it okay. Yeah, it really doesn’t.

I’m overweight. I’m heavy. I need to increase my fitness and yes, decrease my fat. But many times weight issues (too little or too much) are about far more than just eating. They are complex topics that are intertwined with emotions and power and control as well as hormones and genetics and lifestyle.

There are beautiful people of every weight, shape and size. So let’s try to be a little more aware of the power of our words. Let’s try to give each other the benefit of the doubt and treat each other with kindness first and foremost.

Life Lesson #25,683

Yesterday my son had a birthday party to go to. It was a skate party at the local elementary school gym/roller rink. It was his first time roller skating and (not that I’m biased or anything) he did really well. He did not fall nearly as much as he could have. The guy behind the counter tightened the chucks (that’s what they’re called, right?) so that the wheels weren’t speed racer fast. That helped a LOT. Before that he looked like a cartoon with sort of a blur of legs followed by a thump.

Once he’d been going for a while, I tried to give him a couple of pointers as to how to make it a glide more than a rolling run. But, he wasn’t having any of it. So, in the interest of happy birthday’s and happy future skating we shelved any skating lessony stuff for later. Cool.

I love roller skating. Once upon a time, my friends and I would skate all over the Canyon where we lived. I remember barreling down one street, ducking down to catch the lower bar of a metal fence thing and let our feet continue on and fly out from under us. We climbed up and down the epic staircases that line the sides of the Canyon to get to and from each other’s houses. But, that was long ago and far away. When we moved away from LA, I never lived in a place where skating was convenient. We moved to more rural places where dirt and gravel roads were more common. It became impossible to just skate out the front door. It became more of an ordeal to go to a place to skate. And so it fell by the wayside. I remember a few nights skating at the VFW hall in my teen years, but really when we left the concrete jungle for the woods of the northwest one casualty was roller skating.

So, in essence, I have not skated in 25 years. Until yesterday.

What I learned from my 15 minutes of skating yesterday was:

I am a big, old, chicken.

I am no longer fearless. I do not currently have, and would like to rekindle, abandon. I was scared of falling and ill equiped physically to keep myself from doing so. I will have to put skating on the list of things I will be doing when I’ve whipped myself into better shape.

I look forward to it.

***

Yesterday was also girls night out. We went to chinese food for dinner. Yum. Then we went to a bar for some drinks and conversation and dancing. Well, some of us danced. Unfortunately, my dance partner is an extremely early riser and so was forced to abandon me early in the night. We had a good time nonetheless. Met new people, renewed old acquaintances, and enjoyed each others company well into the night. Of course, I cannot stay out all night as I once did. I don’t really miss it. I got home around 12-12:30ish and went to bed after 1. Pretty late for me these days. Somebody (I won’t mention names-child) woke me up at 7 o’clock. Which I think was a little too early. But, I guess it’ll have to do. Now to take my test online for Health class and write up my report for that same class. Back to the ol’ grindstone for me. Hope your weekend has been as fun as mine.

Happy Sunday!

 

 

Today I am grateful for…..midori……sir mixalot…….new friends …….old(er) friends …. and ….. music.

Today is a New Day!

Generally, I’m an fairly optimistic person and can find the bright side of things. Especially if given a bit of time to gain perspective. But, so far, I am hard pressed to find the brighter side of my day yesterday. I guess the entire day didn’t suck, but there were enough sucky things in it that they overshadow the not so sucky parts.

In order to tell the story of yesterday, I have to start on Monday.

Monday was a fitness test in Health class. Since a fitness test is one test you can’t cram for or just wing and expect to do extraordinarily well, I had no expectations of “acing” my fitness test. I am ok with that, though, because I know I have some work to do and I’m working on it. The point here is that I had to walk a mile. Cool. Except that the combination of socks and shoes I had on rubbed my feet almost raw so I have hot spots on the balls of my feet. I got up the next morning with them.

Going along with the fitness test was a lipid test. This required a fasting blood draw. In the morning when I went to pour my coffee, I just barely remembered that I couldn’t have it. So, that’s how I started my day. Sore feet and no coffee.

Managed to get to school without falling asleep. Got my blood drawn without incident. Yippee. Had some breakfast and found some coffee before heading to my Art History class.

My Art History class takes place in a lecture hall with rows of seats on an incline. There are stretched out stairs running down the side. Apparently, my coffee hadn’t quite kicked in as I tried to navigate those stairs. I misstepped and tripped and fell- very nearly in somebody’s lap. Skinned up my knees, bruised my pride, but otherwise was uninjured. Most importantly, I didn’t spill my coffee.

Do I know how to make an entrance or what?

No further incidents at school. Except to say that Pilates is hard.

When I got home, I learned that our fish had died.

So, just in general, yesterday sucked.

And today is a new day.

Today I am grateful for coffee, Tylenol, paint, words, and Pilates.