Fatty, fatty, two by four
I simply could not take my daughter patting my rear anymore, exclaiming, “Mommy, you have a big booty!” Couple that with the fact that my energy seems to be waning, my knees are always hurting, and my clothes are getting tighter:
TIme to go back to the gym. For real this time.
It’s been a few years since I’ve been “Crazy Gym Lady.” And I’ve NEVER been “Eat Healthy Lady.” I figured that everything I knew about fitness was probably outdated, and I’d probably cause serious damage without professional help, so I broke down and hired a trainer.
Have you ever had a trainer? I highly recommend one… about as much as I recommend sticking a fork in your eyeball. At first glance, she seemed harmless enough; a tall, lean blonde, perky but not annoyingly so, with a warm smile and pleasant voice. Until you sign your name on the dotted line. Then she owns your ass, and she has every intention of reshaping it into something more aesthetically pleasing to her standards.
There were simply too many moments in the conversation to write about them all. But let’s start with the food logging. I’m not a big fan of food logging, 1) because I’m lazy, 2) because I don’t care how many calories it has, if I want it, I will eat it anyway, and 3) I am lazy. And let’s not talk about the math involved… ugh. Anyway, my homework was to write down everything I ate the previous 24 hours. She told me not to change anything; eat as I normally would. So I did. When she looked at the list, her mouth dropped open.
“What did you do??”
“You said I should eat normally.”
“I meant YESTERDAY. You should have started trying to eat healthy today!”
“You didn’t specify that.”
*Note to self… never, never, never, never, NEVER antagonize your personal trainer. They have the ability to hurt you in ways you never dreamed possible.
She started to enter the daily values, and it was my turn for my jaw to drop. Did you know that one cup of pistacios have approximately 700 calories? And here I thought I was eating healthy. She finished entering the list, tore it up, and threw it in the trash can. “No more of THAT.”
I know it was just paper, but it was symbolic of throwing away every cheese danish, cheeseburger, white chocolate mocha, and anything else with flavor in that trash can. I wanted to cry. But in physical fitness, there’s no time to cry over symbolism… oh no, because there’s plenty of other ways to make you cry in earnest. And she immediately lead me to one of them.
As she described the “core” exercises, I started to wonder what the hell I was paying for. She had a little foam roller; laying on her side, she placed the roller down by her ankles, and rolled up the side of her calf, holding her body weight up with her elbow. I looked at her skeptically. “This is a sort of ‘self-massage,” she explained, telling me that I would occasionally come across a knot in my muscles and I would have to hold the position for 30 seconds as the knots started to work out.
Uh huh.
Well, let me point out, this is the point where my butt and her butt are slightly different; what she made look effortless had my arms trembling beneath my weight in less than ten seconds. I rolled up my left calf, surprised to find a huge, painful knot… which she immediately caught on to.
“Stop! Hold it right there!”
I held. And held. And held. My arms were shaking again, my midsection felt like jelly, and I began to whine like a newborn puppy. After half a minute, I continued the roll, then looked at her, smug.
“That wasn’t so bad.”
“Good. Because we’re going to do it three times on the outer, inner and back of both your calves. Then the same thing with your thighs.”
By the time I hit the thighs, my arms and shoulders were screaming out in pain, but nothing like I was when I hit a knot mid-thigh. My shriek drew the attention of everyone on the floor, looking over at me with curiosity. My trainer just waved them off.
“It’s nothing. She’s just a whiner.”
And so it begins….
April 26th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
Good luck with it! My wife went with a trainer, she always came home hurting and was always dreading having to go. She quit after she injured her rib somehow.