Aerobic endurance

Let’s recap my exercising history, shall we?

The first time I ever really exercised was in college, though it took a while. My freshman roommate joined the crew team and told me about how the team ran 5 miles every meeting. I thought she was kidding—who could run five whole miles? I mean: please. Aerobics had recently become a huge fad (my God did I just date myself or what?), and a girl in my freshman dorm whose job in high school had been leading an aerobics class decided to start a class in our dorm. I went once. Everyone else seemed to know what they were doing and I couldn’t follow the moves. I never did another aerobics class.

Sophomore year I discovered weights, which I did a little bit.

And all four years I rode my bike a lot around Stanford and Palo Alto, mostly because I didn’t have a car.

When I started working at Apple, I started going to the Fitness Center all the time and working with a personal trainer. I also took up running on the treadmills.

(I found my measurements from the first year I worked at Apple, when I know I was obsessed by my weight and thought about how fat I was…I was obscenely slender. I was in amazing shape. I desperately want to bitch-slap my younger self. I mean, I must have been really hot. What was my problem? Okay, I’m going to stop thinking about this now.)

After I left Apple I joined Gold’s Gym (and went), but I started running in my neighborhood. I discovered that running in the real world was much more fun than running on a treadmill.

I went to USC and didn’t exercise. And I gained about 20 pounds, which I then took off via a liquid diet. I lost the weight, and possibly more, since I ended up a pretty good size 6 and I’d always been a size 8 before. (Always. I mean: always. I have always thought of myself as the very definition of the “medium” size.) I was running regularly—roughly 30 miles a week—and doing weights at the gym.

That lasted a year and a half. Then I got pregnant with Sophia. I couldn’t keep exercising (one of the early signs I was pregnant: jogging made me nauseated). And I gained weight.

After I got a babysitter for Sophia, I could have started exercising again, but instead I wanted to use the time for writing, which meant for me going to Starbucks for a few hours…not exactly a health-food store.

I joined Weight Watchers with my friends the yoga moms and lost a little weight, right before I got pregnant with Simon.

Well, Simon is 10 months old now and if I was going to lose any weight from nursing, it would have happened in, say, month 1, when Simon gained 5 pounds. (Yikes.) I am wearing the largest jeans I’ve ever worn and I feel terrible. I have finally accepted reality and said, “I have to do something.”

I even weighed myself yesterday. I debated doing this, because one bad number can ruin my whole day. But I did and discovered that while I do weigh more than I ever have before (to the best of my knowledge), it’s only about 5 pounds more than before I did the liquid diet. I was actually expecting it to be about 20 pounds more than it was, so I guess it was a good weigh-in, actually.

I think I’m bigger than I’ve ever been because I’m in such bad shape at the moment: it’s all fat!

So I want to exercise again and I need to exercise again, but I have to be realistic: how am I going to do this?

Videos.

(Well, DVDs. But you know what I mean.)

I bought some videos from Amazon using my Amazon Bux, and I’ve started exercising in the morning while Darin is with the kids. I’m doing the Firm, which it turns out is well-known from an infomercial (I didn’t know that, I swear). The Firm combines weights with aerobics. I am fine with the weights part.

Please tell me at some point I’m going to figure out the aerobics part.

I know the instructors on the video make it look easy because they already know the steps and how to put them together, but I swear to God I cannot follow them. “Wait, wait…I put one foot here and then kick over here…” By the time I might possibly do an imitation of the dancesteps, the instructor is on to the next segment.

Please tell me this gets easier. Do I just have to do the video enough times to memorize it?

I like using weights again though, even if for the first time in my life I’m using teeny tiny baby weights—who knew weights even came in the 3 pound size? And that using 3 pound weights would leave me feeling achy? I used to use twenty pound weights to do flys—that’s a 20-pound weight in each hand—and wonder when I was going to move up. And here I am, using 3-pounders and wondering how I’m going to get through this entire routine. (Everything I’ve read about The Firm is true, btw: it kicks your ass.)

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The other half of the getting-in-shape equation is, of course, eating. Specifically, eating less.

Note I’m not using the word “diet.” I’ll let you in on a little secret of mine: if you define “diet” as “rigidly prescribed system of what you can eat,” I’ve been on exactly one diet in my life, the liquid diet. I’ve been obsessed about food, I’ve felt as though I had no will power around food, but I’ve never been able to do the “Okay, I’m only going to eat lettuce from now on” thing for any longer than, say, an hour before I’ve said, “Screw this, point me in the direction of Ben and Jerry’s.” I’ve had girlfriends tell me they’ve been on diets of one type or another for years or done Weight Watchers over and over again. I’m not saying I’m not as screwed up about food and body image as the next American woman. I’m just not a dieter.

My current plan is simply to write down what I eat during the day without comment. For one thing, knowing I’m going to write it down often keeps me from eating it.

One thing I know I can’t do is another liquid diet. For one thing, while it achieved the results I was looking for, it’s horrible and boring and it makes you a little crazy after a while.

Also, I have kids now. I’m a role model. Imagine that: me, Diane, a role model for someone.

If I’m going to “eat right,” I’m going to do it the old-fashioned way: with food on my plate.

Wanting to model healthy behavior for my kids, and for my daughter, especially, has been a driving force behind getting me off my (rather ample) ass and starting to exercise again. See, I exercise! See, I eat and enjoy food! See, I am enjoying my body and being physical!

This is not easy for me. I am, after all, an American woman.

But I hear so many other mothers complain about their bodies in front of their kids. Or say, “Oh, I couldn’t possibly eat that, it’s fattening,” right in front of their tots. (At Sophia’s birthday party, as I was passing out pieces of the chocolate blackout cake from Sweet Lady Jane, I felt a nearly-uncontrollable urge to hit the next mother who said, “Oh, I couldn’t possibly, I’m on a diet.” I almost said to one, “All you have to say is ‘No, thank you.’ Did you learn nothing from the Reagan Era?”)

I know I am unhappy with the state of my body at the moment, but I hope I am not saying it in front of Sophia. I don’t want to make her any crazier than she’s probably going to be, being a female in our culture. I discuss exercise plans and fitness equipment out of earshot (at least, I hope it’s out of earshot). I save my complaints about my size for when it’s just grownups.

I’m sure I give off enough covert signs. All I can do is work on the overt ones for right now.

With exercise videos, no less! Who’d have thought it?

Well, it’ll be soon enough before I’ll have all the time in the world to go into an actual gym. Working out at home is just fine by me for right now.

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If I have anything to report on the body reshaping front, I’ll put it here. Without, you know, actual numbers (like what I currently weigh or my current jeans size) until they get to be numbers I like. I am, however, keeping copious stats in an Excel worksheet.