Working Out is the Worst

As I read through all of my guidebooks on cities in Tuscany I want to visit, I keep running across the same sort of phrase:  "located up a steep hill...".  Well, considering that I do not want to die while I'm in Italy, nor do I want to miss a bunch of beauty, I've finally bitten the bullet and started the tiniest bit of exercising I can, to try to be in better shape in November.  My friends are all really fit, so I don't want to keep them back, either.  I'm sure I won't be in GOOD shape, but I can least be in BETTER shape. (Anyone else think of the scene in All That Jazz where Bob Fosse tells the girl something like, "I'll never make you a great dancer, heck, you may never be a good dancer, but I will make you a better dancer." No?  I'm the only one?  OK.  Moving on.) 

I've had a hate/hate relationship with exercise practically my entire adult life.  Sure, I played a little softball as a kid, but I was never very good at it.  I played volleyball and ran track in high school, but I was never very good at them.  I took ballet in college and...you get the idea.  But I was in pretty good shape and normally sized throughout my youth.  And then at one point in college, I became sort of/not completely anorexic.  It was terrifying - my mind was completely consumed by fear and food and fat. All I could see, when I looked in the mirror, was someone enormously overweight (I wasn't).  So all I ate, once a day, was a pack of cheese peanut butter crackers and an iced tea. I became an expert at telling friends at school that I would eat at home and telling my family at home that I ate at school.  I still remember the paralyzing fear as I looked at a plate of food and knowing I couldn't eat it.  I would cut the food up into tiny pieces and push them around the plate. There are a lot of tricks to steer people away from your eating habits.  Awful.  I got pretty thin, but not monumentally unhealthy, so no one really paid attention.  My mom followed me to the bathroom once to make sure I wasn't throwing up, but that's about it.  And I don't remember why it started or why it suddenly stopped (my former therapist had a few ideas - that's probably for another post, ha ha), but it did just stop one day.  And I have had a fear of it returning ever since.  I never really diet, at least not in any real sense, because I remember that terror and never want it to come back, even though I would love to be thin again, but I was pretty fortunate to stay pretty much the same size and shape for quite a while.

Of course, like anyone else, leaving your thirties and going into your forties, it gets really hard to stay in shape without putting in a little more effort.  I've joined gyms, I've worked out at home, whatever it took to maintain.  And then 2011 happened.  After my surgery, I just stopped.  No working out, no real watching my eating patterns.  I didn't go crazy, but I didn't check myself either.  And after five years of that, plus, going into my fifties, boy is it hard to start over. Living in New York is a good thing, actually, because you have to walk and take stairs daily thanks to the subway, so I'm not completely sedentary, but I have put on some serious pounds over the last five years and my doctors have been suggesting I take it off for the last couple.  Deciding I didn't want to stroke out in Italy was hitting bottom, I guess, and so I'm giving my health and fitness another try.

I'm taking it slowly; I don't want to pull anything, break anything, or hurt anything before my trip.  I'm currently starting every morning with a 20-minute workout DVD that's not too complicated.  It's not that easy, either, at least for me. Depending on which workout I choose, I can either do all of the reps or I can't.  But I figure that will come.  I bought a book called Stretching for 50+ (ugh, just looking at the cover makes me want to eat ice cream) and I do some stretching at night. After a couple more weeks of that, I'm going to start doing a little step work on the steps in my apartment building foyer (hopefully, that will help fix my lack of aerobic fitness) and I'm digging out my old walking workout to play on my iPhone and will try to do that on the weekends, if this heat/humidity ever breaks. I also plan to start walking during my lunch break at work (that's what I did before I went to Italy the first time and it really helped), but again, after the heat and humidity breaks.  I don't have a death wish, after all.

Oh, and I hate it.  I hate waking up early.  I hate sweating.  I hate that everything hurts.  I hate that I can't make my body do the things it used to.  I know these things will fade away, but still.  And I hate not getting that exercise euphoria/endorphin rush that people talk about.  I'm still surly.  But hopefully that will fade away, too.

I should probably make myself accountable and report real goals and milestones, but I don't think I can go that far.  Just writing this much makes me a little accountable, I guess, and it is pretty TMI, but hey, I haven't posted a TMI report for a while, right?  Not that you were longing for one, I'm sure...

I'm FINALLY seeing a show on Friday and can't wait to chat about it!