I Still Can't Fit the Whole Thing in my Mouth

Since coming down with the plague last week, a couple of interesting things have happened.

For one thing, I haven't been to the gym since that Tuesday. Which also includes the two yoga classes I've missed. Now, I can totally tell you all the fabulous excuses I have for myself, but the fact of the matter is that I've let my headspace fall out of the place where it's easier for me to go the gym in the morning and shower & dress there instead of at home.

Which may sound lame, but it gets my fat ass to the gym on an impressively regular basis. For example: all the days I need a shower.

And then there's that part where MonkeyDo came down with the plague, too. There's just nothing quite as sad as a not-so-wee little Monkey that has been turned into a walking, talking furnace and wants to do nothing other than chug water and watch Legally Blonde on repeat.

SweetPea and MonkeySee have so far avoided the plague altogether, which I attribute to liberal applications of Lysol. I check in with MonkeySee to see how he's feeling and if he might be coming down with something and he always responds with "I'm fine" in a tone that sounds almost like he's mocking me.

The shit.

One of the things that I don't think I've had the chance to mention, yet, is that I bought myself the Big Book of Exercises from Women's Health.

I don't think it's exactly a secret that I really don't know a lot about what one should be doing to work out appropriately. At least not outside of this "walking" business that everyone likes to push but is such a lie. Oh, fine. Yes, I do love the treadmill, and probably will not actually give that up because I am a big, fat dork and I like reading tv while wondering what I ever did to the treadmill to make it want to hurt me so much.

I saw the book originally reviewed by Skwigg, and it seemed like something that would work for me and what I need: instructions on how to do things. One of things she mentioned was that it provides not only the basic exercise, but variations on that exercise. Easier, more difficult, using different equipment. Which is great, because I'm generally smart enough to know if I need to do something differently, for whatever reason, but that doesn't mean I know what that other way should be.

I found it in the book store and pawed through it before purchasing to make sure that it really did seem like something that could help me. The pictures are clear and directions easy to understand. It breaks down the exercises by sections of the body and includes "total body" or "power moves" and also includes warm up exercises and variations.

Once I got it home I was able to give it a more thorough perusal. Right about the time that it occurred to me that I had no idea how I would go about selecting which exercises to do, and how many of them, and with how much weight, I found a whole section of workout routines for different goals. The book also starts with a couple chapters of actual reading. It talks about the benefits of regularly exercising with weights, and it talks about reps and sets and why it matters how many of each you do, and what the differences mean for your body. I had a basic concept that you do less sets with more weight for bulking up and more sets with less weights for building leaner muscle, but that was pretty much all I knew. Not only does the book provide more information on this, but it does it in a way that's easy to understand.

It does include a "diet" section, and it does have a whole "four week plan". I didn't give the diet section a thorough read, but it seemed like a pretty basic low carb diet. Probably very similar to most of the "eat clean" type of diets out there.

Like WineDog says, though, nothing's going to work unless you do it.

And you can bet your ass that neither Mr. Pickle nor the Zingers I'm eating right now are on the diet plan.

Probably not even tortilla chips with lime, salt & salsa verde.

The nerve!

In related news, I've started following a cooking blog, and this morning she posted about doing a "detox" plan* put out by this nutritionist from the UK. I started reading the nutritionist's web page and the success stories and trying to make heads or tails of it to see if I thought it was something I could do, something that would work for me. And then do you know what I figured out?

Nothing's going to work unless I do it.

The funny thing about me is that, really, honestly & truly I know what I need to do in order to get where I want to be. The problem is that I let life get so much in my way that I don't make the time that I need to put my nutrition in order the way it's supposed to be.

I also know that I'll never have the time unless I make the time. I keep promising myself that this weekend I'll make the time to clean out cupboards, clean and rearrange the kitchen, buy the tools that I need and the right food for the pantry.

I'm really not good at keeping promises to myself.


*You can follow the bouncing links if you're interested in finding out more about it.