Day Forty-Nine - Weight Loss, Here I Come!

You're not going to believe this....  Wait for it.....  I went to the gym yesterday!!!!  I know!  It's crazy, right???!??!  I was sort of minding my own business when it happened.  I mean, I didn't ask for this. See what happened was, I booked this trip to San Francisco.  Then I sent Jenny the booking information and asked her to print it since I am a little printer challenged right now.  So, she replied and said that I needed to go to the gym and do the treadmill with an incline to prepare for the hills.  She can say this to me because if there is one thing I know it is that I need to exercise.  Additionally, she and I both know that in Barcelona if it had been necessary for us to run up that hill to Tibidabo, I would have kicked her ass!  I'm just saying....  Of course since she didn't know it was a race I had a slight head start.

So, anyway, I went to the gym and got my incline up as high as a 5.0.  I know for you fitness geeks that isn't much.  But for me it is just shy of climbing Everest!  Anyone who knows me knows that I am practically never happy when I sweat and let me tell you that I sweated at the gym.  But what I really need is Bob standing behind me yelling "TALK!  TALK! TALK!!!!!  THAT'S ALL YOU DO!"  That man scares me.

This morning when came downstairs, my calves hurt walking down the stairs.  So I suppose that is a good thing.  It must mean that they got a little bit of a workout.  So that is very exciting.  In addition to the victory of just going to the gym, I may have actually benefited from it.  I could probably use this soreness as an excuse not to go today.  But I don't see that happening.  After all, I have three reasons to go now.

1. I have to get myself to a point in the next 12 days that I can walk all over San Francisco without having a stroke.
2. I can't let Jenny do better than me in San Francisco because that would be like losing some kind of contest and while I don't have the competitive gene when it comes to things like bowling, I will kill myself to beat you at something like this.
3. My parents and I started a diet last week and my first week was terrible!

So, I did everything I needed to do last night before going to bed to prepare for going to the gym today so that I can't come up with an excuse.  I liked going in the middle of the afternoon yesterday.  I think that might become my time to go until I start working again.  There were two people inside the gym besides me and the workers.  It was sort of like having my own Planet Fitness!  Which is great because when Ray and Debra were arguing on Everybody Loves Raymond and I laughed out loud, people didn't turn and stare at me.

I also watched part of the Rachel Ray show which I had never seen before.  I mean I saw her on the Food Network when she did $40 a Day and stuff like that.  But I don't think I have seen her on this particular show.  She made oven baked pork roast steaks.... I'm sure they were low fat.  But she also did this salad that looked really good and I wanted to try it.  I missed the beginning of her making that, so I wasn't sure about all of the ingredients.  So, on my way home from the gym I went and bought the ones that I did see her use and then came on home expecting to look the recipe up on line when I got here.  I still haven't found the damn recipe.  But I used most of the ingredients anyway to make a green salad.  And I don't want to brag, but it might be the best green salad ever made.  Along with my salad I had corn on the cob and a sirloin steak that I threw on the grill.  But I did cut all the fat off the steak before grilling it, so I think it was probably a pretty healthy piece of beef.  Of course, it may have weighed slightly more than 3 oz. or whatever a healthy portion is.

So, the whole trip to the gym yesterday really got me motivated.  Maybe it is just the kick in the pants I needed to stop eating crap all the time and start getting off my fat butt.  And I guess I owe the trip to the gym to Jenny, so thanks Jenny!  Last night after I got home she texted me to say how long she had walked on her treadmill and at what incline.  She beat me.  Which means, that today, I will do at least what she did yesterday, perhaps a little more.  I hope they have a good defibrillator at Planet Fitness.

Jenny and I used to go to the gym together and I always did better when we went together.  It really helps me to measure myself against somebody.  When the only other two people in the gym are a man with one of those weight lifting belts on who grunts a lot and a man who weighs 750 lbs and must lift his stomach in order to step on the treadmill, it is hard to measure yourself against them.  But hey, you work with what you've got!  So, I don't mind telling you that I kicked the 750 pound mans ass on both speed and incline on that treadmill!!!!  He also gave out WAY before me!  That's right!!!!  Who's your momma, big man!!?!!  I can't wait to see him today.... He's going DOWN!!!!