Filtering Out the Noise

I haven't gone all that public about my exercise plan. I hate going public about diets or anything. Whenever I have, tons of people start lobbing bombs of advice. They are well-meaning, but it ultimately undermines my efforts and helps beat me down and give up.

Sorry, people who love me, it's true. As someone who also feels she is an expert on everything, I KNOW I've lobbed my own bombs of unsolicited advice as well.

I apologize.

The advantage to deciding to pay someone to help you do something is that it creates a safety wall between you and the rest of the world. Maybe it's just me, but once I decided to fork over the money for this to a recommended professional, I feel like I need to trust her more than 20 years of experience over the latest article someone has read. I'm not saying I'm getting bad advice, but it gets confusing and frustrating.

I'm better off taking small steps and working through that.

As I explained, my first plan was to get beyond just starting. I was so sick of starting from square one. Just getting the exercise clothes on and going through the door of the gym was enough for me. I told myself if I walked into the door of the gym, I had accomplished my objective. So, in the early days, if I went to the gym and played on my phone, THAT WAS ENOUGH. I had won.

The awesome thing is, once I get in the door of that gym, I am going to exercise. Might not be the best exercise or the latest and greatest, but if I walk through the door, the major part of the battle is won.

My initial commitment was to simply make my training sessions and it took another full six months to ramp up to go on days other than the ones with the trainer. Honestly, I don't even know how I manage to do the other days. It's unprecedented. So, you see, I'm WINNING this.

When my labs came back with no change or in some cases worse, I had a little freak out. And Kara was so awesome. I'm paying her to look at my situation, evaluate and advise. So she did her job and when she saw the numbers, because she's a professional, because she's MY professional, she said, "You need to do more cardio. So, whenever you come into the gym when we are not going to train I want you to do a minimum of cardio and I don't care what it is: treadmill, elliptical, bike, etc.

It was awesome because the hardest part was getting there. After that, I knew that I could get on the treadmill for 30 minutes. And it was more awesome, because I got on that DAMN machine and did 45 minutes to an hour each session, wearing the heart monitor, shooting for 300-400 calories burned.

The two training sessions amounted to about 800-1000 per week. By adding two more sessions, I increased that to 1600-2000 a week.

And a little bit of weight peeled off.

And a little bit of blood pressure lessened.

Miraculous.