I need to lose around 30 pounds. Well, alright, I NEED to lose a little over 15 pounds. The rest I just want to lose.
But to lose weight, I have to navigate the nasty world of diet and fitness. Why is it nasty? Because for all diet and fitness being scientific ideas, everybody and their dog seems to have come out with their own special promise-it-will-work, best-workout-or-diet-ever book. Kettleball is the best exercise! No, dance! No, Insanity is the thing that will save you! P90X! Try military diet! Try Metabolic Cooking! Just eat healthy and balanced (whatever that is)!
This is all too complicated for me. And it drives me nuts because I feel I cannot trust anybody. Exercise I can see being more forgiving. As long as you get moving and keep moving, you should be doing something. However, exercise is often marketed by itself. Flat Abs Fast says a magazine workout. Six weeks later, I may have abs, but they are still not flat. Exercise seems to need at least some sort of diet or something along with it to make it effective. So now I'm skeptical of every exercise claiming, well, anything. Oh yeah, I'll look ripped if I follow P90X for three months... and, lesser known, strictly follow their diet. That includes freaky food like Butternut Squash Soup.
Which leads me to my next pitfall. I hate diets. It's not just the giving things up, although I'm certainly no good at that. Diets are work. You have to cook different food, you have to figure out different food, and you have to shop for strange ingredients and figure out how it all goes together and "healthy" food often includes things like peppers and tomatoes. There's got to be a way to eat healthy without eating those kinds of things. And I tend to not like cooking either. Complicated recipes make me want to just toss the whole thing.
And working out is often incredibly boring. Or painful. Or both. I can start doing workouts, but my motivation wanes as I think of spending an hour doing something that is just no fun. I actually made it through two weeks of P90X on my own mostly by guilt tripping myself and telling myself that an hour really isn't that long. It's not. But it's still boring. Do I want to graft something boring onto my schedule forever, or should I just go find something that isn't boring?
Exercise with a purpose... beyond my often-unrealized dreams of having killer abs... is one of the only things that makes exercise seem attractive. Doing random exercises is boring... punching a punching bag... now that's fun. Martial Arts are fun. Dancing is fun.
But then I come back to an earlier problem. Will any of these things actually get me in shape? Do boxers do normal workouts to get them ready for boxing? I know if I actually ever wanted to box, I'd have to run. Boxing requires serious stamina and I have none. Dancing is fun, yes, but is it enough work to burn calories? Same thing with Martial Arts.
Bleh, all this makes my brain hurt. I want someone to tell me what to do and when to do it! I had a personal fitness trainer for like two sessions once. First session was ok. He made me do more things than I thought I could do simply by saying "one more" enough times that I questioned his definition of "one." It's harder to give up when they are sitting there watching you, unlike DVD workouts. Second workout was with boxing gloves... and it was epic. And destroyed my muscles. I wish I could afford a personal trainer or someone who could just tell me what to do and I would somehow be able to trust that they knew what they were talking about.
Maybe I should work on not being a cynic first.
No comments:
Post a Comment