"A temple of doom!"
"...I resent that."
But those 10-15 seconds when I stop cleaning, start thinking about Moe, Larry and Curly running upstairs to the basement, and just generally waste time while the water fills the tub are pretty much the story of my exercise routine over the past six months. What was once a fairly routine part of my life - diet and exercise - has now been interrupted by the small pleasures in my life.
Back in April, May and June, when I stepped on the scale for the first time in a while and clocked in just a Cheeto over 300 lbs., it was a shock to the system. Shocks to the system are not always bad. This particular shock kept my focus intact for 10 consecutive weeks, after which I had lost around 40 lbs. and seemed nearly halfway to my goal of being svelte enough to slide into a tuxedo in August 2012.
Then the program ended, I gave myself a week off (which I don't regret), and decided to change up my workout schedule drastically. This new schedule would put me in the gym only two days a week, freeing up the rest of the week to perform other fitness activities that were not restricted to just a gym. The program went great for about two weeks, but here's the thing about days off...um, I like having them. A lot. So when a Friday would roll around and I hadn't been to the gym at all that week, it didn't seem that big a deal to me to say, "Well, I'll just do it Saturday." Then Saturday comes and goes and it gets pushed to Sunday. Sunday turns into Monday, so on and so forth. I was still losing a little bit of weight here and there, but not nearly to the point I had been. At least I had my diet to fall back on.
But as Garfield says, diet is "die with a t."
"I don't get it."
(Neither do I. But he's a national treasure. Or so we're told.)
Anyway, my diet kind of went kaput. During the latter half of my first exercise tier, I had been allowing myself to eat mostly anything I wanted, but in smaller quantities. As my brain and body quickly realized that my new workout wasn't going the way I planned, it basically picked up the orange cones, said "Have at it," and that's when my No Seconds Rule for dinner turned into my No Thirds Rule.
I finally slogged my way through the second exercise tier and decided to go on break for two weeks, which finally ended last month, when I went back into the gym for a 1-week-only Wayne-Newton-like performance that culminated in an intense Saturday run where I was thinking the entire time, "Yes! I'm back, and you all look beautiful!"
The next week, I got sick, skipped the gym a couple days, apparently blacked out for three weeks, celebrated Christmas with lots'o food, celebrated New Year's with lots'o booze, and now here we are. It's January 6, I'm back in the 270-lb. range, and I lack even rudimentary motivational skills to seek out the gym again.
But is there hope? For Christmas, yours truly gave Holls a copy of "The Biggest Loser Challenge" for Wii. And no, that wasn't her cue to go Ron Artest on me and start wildly throwing punches because she thought I was implying something. She asked for it for Christmas, and I bought it for her. No subtle messages here. However, I've been enjoying it as much as she has. It's slowly but surely bringing me back into the mix of diet and exercise, as this game tracks how much you do of both. It's not perfect, and it's no substitute for a treadmill or anything like that, but it's getting me back into the exercise game, little by little.
And what of those little pleasures in life I mentioned earlier? At first, it was just a devastating combination of watching TV and not really wanting to do anything else. See, we bought a 46" LED back in September, and that thing has gotten more play than Justin Timberlake at a Catholic girls' college. After the initial excitement wore off, the pleasures turned mainly into reading. Since my senior year of college, I've had a voracious appetite for reading, which is a good thing, for the most part. But it occasionally cuts into that precious exercise time that I so desperately need as well. In both cases, however, I feel the effects for a long time after I exercise either my body or my mind. I feel smarter and I feel more in shape.
"It's a good thing."
"A Martha Stewart joke? How 1995 of you"
Also, I've been writing a lot more lately. Not so much in this blog, but in other works I've been tinkering at for years. Mr. Gordon's Opus, if you will. Writing is becoming more fun for me, especially when part of it involves searching Google Images for things like "O.J. and the glove" and "Garfield with murderous look."
Reading and writing taking up too much of my time? Every teacher I had from 1st-12th grade just asked where I was from 1990-2002.
Now that I'm learning how to balance my reading and writing, I now have to learn how to incorporate my exercising into the mix. I don't have a plan yet for how I might start logging meaningful exercise minutes, or at least enough minutes to merit a blog entry every now and again. But I'm working on it. Who knows? Maybe it's time to change up the format of this blog a little bit. Change can be a good thing.
Then again...
Play me off, Cat on Piano!
Amy and I were both commenting how great you looked at Christmas. Maybe it's the Hannaford red, but methinks you "just" need to jump back on the horse...er...treadmill. :)
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