Tag Archives: exercise

Kick-Ass Technology

Freeform thoughts, In the here & now,

whip1

So…last day off work before I’m back for the long run up to Christmas, sadly I have no annual leave left now at all. I looked, twice, in that way you do when you’ve just eaten the last hob-nob and you have to re-check the packet to make sure you haven’t missed any crumbs. Bugger. I hate it when I’ve officially used up every last drop of time off for the year. Even though I really love my job to the point where time flies and I enjoy being there, my time isn’t my own when I’m on someone else’s clock you know?

Still, I shall make the most of my last day off by trying to impress my watch. Yes, you heard me right. I have a new voice to add to the cast of characters, another person to whom I’m now accountable. I mean strictly speaking it’s not actually a person, but it has a voice and the capability to nag me into doing things I have no desire to do, without any input from me. And it’s just as hard to ignore. I haven’t landed on a name yet – it’s like having a newborn, you kind of need to get to know them a little bit before you know the name you like really suits them – but it’s alive and well and sitting on my wrist and due to my jet-lag-inspired long lay-in this morning it’s already given me the hard word that today I’m being a lazy cow and need to get moving.

In addition to delivering a non-stop stream of email, texts, calls and other assorted crap to my fingertips, it also counts my steps, nudges me to make sure I move around on an hourly basis if it feels I’ve been sitting down for too long, gives me an exercise target and nags me on a regular basis if I don’t appear to be making much progress. FFS, it’s like having a personal trainer chewing my ear on the hour every hour. I can almost hear it clearing it’s throat in the background as I’m sitting typing this – last time it prompted me to get up and move around for at least a minute I went and made a cup of tea and I’m starting to wonder whether that was against the rules…I mean maybe I was supposed to do a minutes’ worth of power-yoga or something?

Trouble is, I’ve already set the bar quite high – it took up it’s position as nag-in-chief on my wrist whilst I was away. And whilst I was away there was lots to see and do. As I limped, footsore and knackered back to our room every night after long days spent exploring stuff which distracted me in the moment from just exactly how much my feet hurt, it gave me a big pat on the back and told me I’d achieved my target for the day…no shit, Sherlock. It’s a different story now…a half day’s worth of activity yesterday followed by a 10 hour flight, an early night and an extra long sleep have all contributed to a swift re-calibration of my overall output, and it’s sitting on my wrist with it’s micro-chip pursed in disapproval and a renewed determination to kick my lazy ass.

That, together with Charlie the dog’s death-stare because he wants his walk means that I have little option at this point but to get up and get moving. No rest for the wicked and all that. I’ve already put two loads of washing in and cleaned the kitchen, this is surely the time where I can sit and catch up on all the things I’ve sky-plussed whilst I’ve been away..? Charlie and the watch both have other ideas, so it appears that I’m out-voted…that’ll be no, then!

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A New Habit Is Born

In the here & now, , ,

habit-2

I’ve been thinking more you know, about what we talked about yesterday – my love of the armchair and lack of inclination to exercise…it’s really not on is it? You all shared some interesting perspectives and I thank you for that…it helps. I get it. I can’t have a hissy fit at the bitch in the bathroom if I’m not keeping up my end of the bargain, and if me and my love of food are going to find a way to rub along inside a skinny body, limiting food intake is never going to be enough all on its own. So I guess I just need to take the bull by the horns. I don’t want to, but wanting to want to is chewing away at me like an irritating wasp flying around my head.

I’ve been in negotiations with the asshole in my mind for the last couple of days. I’m here to tell you whilst he’s starting to give me less grief about what I’m eating, he’s gone in hard on this one – why don’t you get 50lbs off first before you think about getting more active, if you try now everything will hurt ten times more, you work really long hours and you don’t deserve to ache from head to toe because you’re pushing yourself too hard when you’re going to be losing weight anyway if you’re eating the right things…

If you’re of a sensitive disposition, you might want to cover your ears for a moment.

Sod off Asshole, with your bad karma…I’m NOT LISTENING   fu

It strikes me that motivation is step one of changing a habit, even if it’s not a habit you really want to change. Knowing it’s something you need to change combined with really, really wanting the outcome that forming a different habit will bring is as good a starting point as any other, would you agree? There’s a bloody mountain of information out there about how long it takes to form a new habit and a number of differing views. I posted a link to one of the better ones on my interesting stuff page. But what all those clever people with letters after their name seem to agree on is this; if what you’re trying to adopt as a habit is easy, it will become habitual much more quickly than if what you’re trying to do is hard.

So. This is where I got to with my negotiations. There’s nothing to stop me continuing my love affair with the armchair, providing that’s not all I do every day after work, right? Now before you get giddy I’m not proposing that I go for like a 5k run every evening, or get up close and personal with some kettle bells – I want curing not killing – but I could do something manageable, and build up my stamina slowly. So here’s what’s going to happen after I get back from my trip…every day when I get in from work, I’m going to clip Charlie’s lead on and go walk him for half an hour. It’s an extra walk in the day for him, (he spends 3 hours romping through the fields every day with all his four-legged friends in doggy day-care whilst I’m at work) and it’s half an hour’s walk per day that I don’t normally have. So it counts…every little counts.

So I’ve said it out loud now…shared it with you guys. I’m accountable. That’s going to be a new part of my daily routine…rain or shine (yeah way to go with the timing Dee, with winter just around the corner, doofus) and I’ll turn it into a habit if it kills me. Which to be fair it very well might 🙂 But I’m going to persevere. I’ve walked far more on this trip than I have in a while…ankles are stiff, knee is sore but you know what, I’m on it.

I’ll keep you posted as to how many times it takes before it feels like a habit instead of a chore…together we can see just how much these experts really know!

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Walking in the rain.

In the here & now, ,

wet dog

Morning…happy Bank Holiday Monday. Oh look, ‘quelle surprise’ it’s chucking it down outside. I can’t even claim a pyjama day because my dog is still going to expect a full service walk. Try and get away with anything like a short cut and I’ll get the doggy death stare as soon as he senses we’re homeward bound…it’s like he taps into my thoughts when we leave the house and if I deviate from the planned route somehow he just knows. You know how you tried to skip two or three pages when your kids were nodding off mid-way through their bedtime story, and three words into thinking you’d gotten away with it they were wide awake and protesting..? That’s what I’m talking about.

But today that’s ok, because didn’t I make a deal with myself that I’d do some exercise this weekend…I even said it out loud, what’s more I wrote it down and a bunch of folk have read it so I’m committed to the cause. In the rain. I mean it’s not just a bit damp out there, we’re talking big fat raindrops falling from a heavy grey sky and every car that drives past my house sounds like it’s driving through a stream. Lovely.

I think I’d enjoy walking in the rain if I was skinny. I’d have on some chic little raincoat, and a pair of adorable wellies, which would accommodate my calves without so much as a grumble. Somehow, those big fat raindrops would surround me without actually landing on me, and I’d arrive back home looking rosy-cheeked, without a hint of frizzy hair and looking for all the world as though walking in the rain was my favourite thing ever.  I would have walked so far that the dog would be exhausted and he wouldn’t nag to go back out again for the rest of the day.

But because I’m fat, we all know it’s not going to be that way. My chic little raincoat in fact resembles something you might find at the local camping centre. My calves will be shoved into wellies that were not designed for fat legs, so they’ll kink somewhere around my ankles and give me blisters, which if I’m lucky I won’t notice because I’ll be too busy grumbling about the red hot poker someone’s wiggling about in my knee. I’ll arrive home soaked to the bone, with a hyper excited spaniel who feels short-changed because we didn’t stay out for at least 3 hours, and he’ll be ready to go again within 10 minutes of getting home.

But, with every step I’m going to imagine the warm shower afterwards, and the feeling of achievement I’ll get when I’ve followed through on my promise to look after both the dog, and myself by not settling down in the armchair with a cup of tea and a packet of custard creams because it was raining too hard to go out.

Happy days!

 

 

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I’ve been thinking.

Freeform thoughts, In the here & now, , ,

fat

It’s a Bank Holiday weekend and I’ve got nothing planned. I might do some exercise.

I’ll just put that out there and let the words settle a bit, experiment you know with how they sound as I read them back. Hmm. They say diet and exercise together is the way to do it, but I hesitate for no other reason than really, who wants to see a proper fatty exercising?  Well when I say for no other reason, that’s not strictly true…there’s at least one other reason – I’m so unfit I’m afraid it might actually kill me.  In recent times I’ve been inclined to go and have a lie down if I’ve felt some exercise coming on.

Remember my skinny knees..? I was so fit at that time. I don’t mean fit as in phwoaaar fit, I mean fit as in fit.  I went to the gym pretty much every day and exercised for at least an hour, and I had bags of energy all the time. I’ve got to be honest, I didn’t enjoy it, in fact I hated it – always have – but in my newly slim and determined to stay slim body I was almost evangelical about it. I’d be beavering away on the cross-trainer and all the time I’d be muttering through gritted teeth about the injustice of not being born with a metabolism that laughed in the face of calories and screamed ‘come and have a go if you think you’re ‘ard enough’ at whatever junk I threw down my neck. But in spite of that I was pretty disciplined, because I had both feet planted firmly in the sweet spot – I was in the zone. And not looking out of place in a room full of other sweaty slim people helped.

I didn’t exercise so much when I was losing the weight, it was something I started doing once I’d pretty much reached my goal weight.  There’s something about fatties exercising that just…well, it’s a car crash isn’t it? For everyone that looks at you and thinks ‘go on lass, good for you’ there’ll be ten others who can’t wait to tell someone about the munter in the gym who was giving it large on an exercise bike, which by the way was threatening to buckle under the strain.  ‘Hahahaha you should have seen the state of it’…and for me that’s like going back in time, standing in front of that class being compared to a pig.

Perhaps I’ll stay clear of the gym until I can blend in a bit more easily. I’ll settle for pushing myself to walk a bit further and a bit faster with my pooch, who’ll think all his Christmases have come at once, bless him. Never mind that my knee will give me hell…no pain, no gain eh?

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