Jenn's Zen

I’ve never been an athlete or gym rat. While there have been times you could have called me athletic, cheerleading comes to mind, I’ve just never been that sort of person. Until possibly now.

Last May a few planets aligned and I found myself going to the gym on a regular basis. The necessary planets were 1) Oprah was a smaller size than me 2) I hit a very unmagical number on the scale 3) my wardrobe was getting smaller and smaller because I REFUSED to buy a bigger size 4) my wedding ring no longer fit and I was to embarrassed to have it sized up, AGAIN 5) Lifetime Fitness came to town and JD’s employer provided a corporate membership for all employees and their families.

So, we got our membership cards and were there at the open house in May 2007. They opened two or three days later, and I’ve been there five days a week ever since (more or less/ give or take). I’m still pretty shocked about it myself. Call it right time, right mindset.

I told myself that I had a year to get my fitness act together. E had one more year of pre-school and after that the prudent thing would be to find a more permanent part-time job. This would be the last year that I would have the flexibility in my schedule to make this happen. Also, the company CEO made it clear, use the membership or he would cancel it. I treated it like a job. Every morning I got up, put work-out clothes on and went to the gym. If E had school I dropped her off first, if she didn’t then she came along with me (two hours of childcare provided per day). Luckily she enjoyed the childcare area and didn’t pitch a fit about going. One year, my goal was 50 pounds. Basically, figuring a pound a week.

I started with a lot of cardio, spin class, treadmill, elliptical, 30-60 minutes at a time. 10 pounds came off quickly; the next five were incredibly difficult. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I was of the mindset that doing something (anything) was better than going back to bed after dropping the little girl off at school. And it was better, but I needed a better plan. JD and I decided to spend some money (I believe his actual quote was, “we’ve spent more money on worse things”) and had the metabolic testing done. This gave us insight into how many calories our bodies needed and what our heart rate needed to be in order to burn fat. Fabulous information. I started a food diary and the next five pounds came off much easier. Then another plateau hit. I then considered venturing over to the weights, but I was very intimidated by the machines and didn’t feel like I knew what do to.

I made an appointment with a personal trainer. Little did I realize that I was actually signing up for a sales pitch. It wasn’t rude so much as I just would have liked to have known that’s how it was going to end up. Yes, I liked the information, yes, I’d love to set up a plan and work with you regularly. It costs how much?! Could I justify that? Could I meet my fitness goal without it? I forked over all my Christmas and Birthday money and called it a personal investment.

The trainer met with me twice a week for eight weeks. He literally worked my a$$ off. It took us awhile to get used to each other’s personalities, his sense of humor and love of science fiction and my inability to say something was too hard or to complain. Hm… somethings just follow me no matter where I go! Eventually we got a good read on each other. It worked, my body, the one buried beneath too much ice cream began to reappear. My wedding ring fit again. My muffin top vanished. I needed a smaller bra. *sigh* At the end of eight weeks it was the holiday season. I was halfway to my goal and I gave myself the month of December off from the food diary. There was no way to figure out what was in stuff offered at various parties and gatherings. I did the best I could, continued to work out and maintained.

Whew.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 11:43 pm and is filed under LTF, Pieces of Me. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.