The Day After

Thankfully I was not super sore by any means. I felt it a little but not bad. I was definitely going back. I could do this resistance training and 15 minutes of Cardio. I mean how hard could it be. There was not all that complicated machinery in this Gym. It was like Gym Lite or the anti-gym or something. (That should have been a sign)

Some of my best adventures have come from uttering the phrase, "How hard can it be?" I have a friend, Cathy, who swears on my tombstone is going "Harder than it looks Miss Pam, harder than it looks." It is a wonder her husband, Ron, lets me in the door after the bathroom remodeling adventure at their house. Several years ago Cathy wanted to redo the bathrooms at her house. I had experience wallpapering, as I had wallpapered my whole house with the help of two of my friends. And it was all the rage at that time. Problem was we had to strip off the old wallpaper and pull up the floor in the bathroom. So we jumped in with both feet while Ron was at work. I am not sure she told him in advance what we were planning on doing. He worked from 3 to 11 as I recall. So he was in for a surprise when he came home that night, to bare walls and no carpet on the bathroom floor. There was some hideous linoleum under the carpet in the bathrooms as I recall. And we had to dispose of all this garbage we were creating. He was surprised but not really mad when he came home. And we got the new stuff up within the week. We had issues in the bathroom behind the toilet tank, thankfully Cathy had the foresight to keep me from attempting to take the toilet tank off. She has always been the voice of reason. We did some other smaller home improvement projects after that, but nothing that major and I am sure Ron is suspect when ever I come over to this day.

You would think that I would have learned my lesson by now about this stuff, but no and that is what is always amazing to me. Somehow I think the outcome will be different. I mean it is always a fun time and I at least get an amusing if not totally hilarious story or two out of my adventures. So I was still thinking how hard could this all be. I survived the 1st mini session.

When I got to work, Brandon had like 100 questions for me and I was happy to talk to him about it. I should have been suspicious when he kept saying. Just follow through with all of this, as we have a mutual friend who did they gym for 6 weeks then up and quit when it got hard. I said I was not doing that and if started to waiver in my determination to kick me in the butt and make me go and remind me how excited I was at this point in time. He was the only one besides Brad that I told about working with a personal trainer. I did not want lots of questions in case it did not work out or I did not follow through with it.

Plus I really needed to BELIEVE I could do this. I was miserable in my current state I hated that I had let myself get this big and so grossly out of shape. I had wanted to start playing tennis again, but I did not think I could drag my 220 lbs around on the court. And I knew that my blood pressure was running as high as it ever had and I did not want end up on blood pressure medicine when I could avoid it. I had a wake up call when I saw how bloated I looked in some professional pictures for our business. I looked like a whale. I did not know the person in those pictures.

I did not want to be that person and if I did not take control of my situation now, how much more weight was I going to gain. Another 10 lbs, another 20 lbs, when was it going to end and how much damage was I going to do to my health. These are the secrets I kept to myself and did not dare say out loud for fear they would come true. My husband Brad never really said anything about my weight. And I really did not ask him his opinion. I did say that I appreciated him not harping on it. His typically British response was, "I figure you see how overweight you are when you look in the mirror, I don't need to tell you the obvious." (Okay some of you are thinking where did I bury his parts, but he was not wrong so I could not be mad at him) I had not bothered to tell him I was approaching his weight and some days I am sure I weighed more than him. Talk about a wake up call and reality slamming you in the face, he is a good 6 or 7 inches taller than I am. But I had noticed he did not run his hand over my legs like he did when we were first married. I did not want to admit that it could be due to my weight, but it probably was and I never asked him, because I did not want to hear the answer. Not knowing, was much better than knowing and having to confront the truth. I was so unhappy and it was all my own doing.

And being so unhappy was affecting my whole life and my attitude towards everything. It made me feel like I was a failure, even though I seemed successful in my professional life, I felt like a failure. Why would anyone use me, I lacked self discipline to control my weight and my fitness. Why should they have confidence that my accounting abilities would be different. I don't know if this is what clients and potential clients thought but it is what I thought about me.

So I was hanging all my hopes and dreams on this resistance training working and my being able to do it. I really needed to believe it was the right thing for me and that it would be doable. I was desperate and if this did not work I did not know what would be next. This was kind of like my last resort. So I was over the moon about how nice Marianne was and how non judgemental she was. She said I was not the biggest person she had seen get fit. I was really really worried about being a whale in a sea of fit people and not fitting in at all. That is one thing that appealed to me about this place, there were never a ton of people in the gym at any one time. It is hard when you are struggling to do 5 of something and the person next to you is reeling of 25 of the same one with what seems like no effort. And in those times it is hard to remember they started out where you did. All you can see is I am this low and they are this high.

(If anyone else identifies with this. Know that your trainer is there to help you achieve your goals no matter what your current fitness level is. They don't seem to concentrate on where you are not but on how to get you to where you want to be.)

It was Thursday and due to out of town company I could not train with Marianne until Monday, 4 days for me to think about could I do this and would I do it. I never really thought about not doing it. I mean so far it had been a fabulous experience, no treadmill, not a lot of pain, no fancy machines. I mean this was pretty easy so far. How much harder could it get? It was just resistance training and cardio.

Stay tuned.

Until next time Keep Fit.

pam