Facts.

In the interest of transparency, I am going to give you some unsolicited information. I’m baring my soul here, people, have the decency to listen.

• I’m 25, turning 26 in January.
• I am 5’6.5”
• I weigh 148 pounds
• My BMI is 23.5

So, looking at these numbers, I seem like a normal-sized person. Not overweight, not underweight, but normal. And I am. I’m not interested in fitness as a fix to a problem, I’m interested in fitness as prevention.

You see, my mother is 59 and obese. She’s been that way for most of my life. She’s always been overweight, but as she gets older, her weight becomes more of a problem. Diabetes, joint problems, high cholesterol and heart conditions run in the family. Both of my mother’s parents died young – mid-50s and mid-60s. So you understand why I worry about her.

And in turn, I worry about myself. My mother was a wonderful mother to my brother and I, and made sure we got exposure to a variety of fruits and vegetables. I never went hungry, and I certainly didn’t see fast-food as a staple around our house. She made healthful meals that introduced me to a way of eating that has kept with me throughout my life. Even now, I have little interest in fast food. But neither does my mother, and her weight has gotten the best of her.

The only difference I can see between the two of us is exercise. My mother, with her bad knees, bad feet, and other physical problems, has a hard time doing any exercise that has impact. Even walking hurts her after a while. She’s doing her best to work around it, but I don’t want to see myself in that place.

Hence, at 23.5 BMI, I am already having a little panic attack. A BMI of 25 is considered overweight, and I have merely 1.5 little points to make it to that place. That’s only 8 pounds away from where I am right now. I gain 8 pounds, and I’m in the “overweight” category. It just won’t do. I can’t have only a cushion of 8 pounds. It has to be more.

So, hence I want to get into shape. Lose around 10 pounds, and get myself to a BMI of 22 or less. That, to me, is healthy. It’s in the middle of the range, giving me a healthy cushion between me and the “overweight” BMI of 25.

So there you have it. That’s why a 25-year old with a healthy weight is so concerned about fitness. The more proactive I am, the greater chance I have of being a healthy 30-year old, a healthy 40-year old, and a healthy 50-year old. I want to see what life looks like when your 80, so I’m not going to let a lack of fitness be the reason I don’t.

Welcome to my nightmare.

Okay, so it’s not so nightmarish. I mean, I’m 25, in the right range of weight for my height and have a fairly thin body. But in the last year of my life, my ability to choose the right foods, drum up some willpower for exercise and really strengthen myself has gone kaput.

Why, you ask? (Or didn’t. I guess I’m the one asking.) Excuses are nothing but that – excuses. But here are some of my flimsy excuses for the flabbiness around my midsection, the sagging arms and the overall loss of energy.

1. I moved from my college town, with my college gym, where I’d established a routine in the last 5 years of fitness. I knew the restaurants with the most health-conscious foods, I knew how long it would take me to do a circuit at my gym, and I felt comfortable. Now I live in a different city, with a different gym and different restaurants. There are all new temptations and (even after a year there), my gym still feels a bit foreign.
2. I got married. As anyone who is married knows, after dieting your ass off before the wedding, the last thing you want to do for the next year is think about dieting again. But I’m cutting myself off at the bend. It’s been 3 wonderful months of matrimony, so it’s time I got myself back into fighting shape.
3. I fell in love. I guess this should come before I got married, but this is just the order I thought of these things in, so sue me. As anyone knows when you fall in love, you get this sudden compulsion to spend every waking moment with your other. And, every sleeping moment. So, getting myself up at 6:00 a.m. got harder and harder, as I wanted nothing more than to spend that extra hour in bed with my honey. But now it’s a habit, and a very bad one at that. My 4-times-a-week routine of morning workouts is a long-gone thing of the past. So sad.
4. I got a new job. At my old job, there was an understanding that twice a day, I would take breaks to scrunch in a 15-minute walk. I would power-walk it around the building I worked in and then run up the six flights of stairs 5 or 6 times a day for 2-minute mini-breaks. At my new job, there are no stairs, and there’s a culture of “stay at your desk for nine hours straight.” Getting up for these kinds of breaks does not seem to be encouraged. Regardless, I haven’t put a lot of effort into finding a way to do it.
   

So, it’s time to do something. A lot of something. But, as I’ve learned with myself in the past, it takes baby steps to do it right. With my other blog, I set weekly goals, and then reported on how I did on accomplishing those goals. I’m starting again. But I’m going to start with a set of long-term goals to give myself direction. Here we go…

Long-term goals
1. Track every ounce of food that passes my lips so I understand when, why and what I’m eating.
2. See a weekly increase in my arm strength, which has gotten to a sad state.
3. Establish a routine that works for me, makes me feel healthy, happy, and not too overwhelmed.
4. Find a way to work small fitness breaks into my day – lunges, squats, stairs or walks; whatever works at my current location.
5. Work fitness into my daily thoughts again, so that it becomes reflex to find a way to work out each and every day, and watch what goes into my mouth.
6. Begin keeping a fitness journal and be one of those dorky women at the gym who carries it around and makes notes as I work out. Record reps, weights, habits, calories burned on cardio machines and overall energy level.

This week’s goals (I usually limit myself to two or three to make them more attainable):
1. Go to the gym 3 times this week, and spend at least 30 minutes of each visit on cardio
2. Have one of those 3 visits be a morning workout – before work on a weekday.
3. Make my arms sore once this week.

This blog will be a place I talk about my setbacks, my efforts at developing a routine, my achievements and generally ramble about fitness. Maybe I’ll post some of the fitness debates that go on in the blogs I read. Maybe I’ll talk about The Biggest Loser, which I’ve become strangely drawn to. Maybe I’ll not post at all during the week and leave everyone hanging. But just watch it, because practically anything could be coming your way.

Wish me the best of luck. And wish my willpower the same, while you’re at it.