The Plan: Back In the Game

The upside of being on jury duty and spending two days just sitting on my can is that I’m so ready to get up and move, again.  I get more than a little paranoid that if I step away from my exercise routine for too long that I’m going to lose it.  It being that thing that propels me forward.  I’ve never been able to keep the flame lit for so long before and, while I have faith that I’m not going to let it go out now, I know that in the past I have easily let it all go and I don’t want to do that again.  If I go for more than three days without working out I start haranguing myself about being a slacker.  I think this time, though, my break was a necessity.  I was emotionally and physically overdone.  Somehow I ended up with a stiff, sore neck with limited mobility along with a compressed disc in my lower back.  I think they were both related to a cold that my family passed around, but I don’t like to mess with exercise when my back is messed up, so I’m ok with that.  But I’m so ready to start moving again!  Oh.  My.  Goodness!!!!  By about 1:00 and my fifth hour of sitting in the jury room yesterday I wanted to start running laps around the room!  Of course I didn’t because that would probably make the people around me have weird thoughts about me, but I wanted to.  Instead I made a plan.

 {Being in the courthouse is less than photograph worthy, so here are some January-December 2015 comparisons.  I can actually see the changes!}

 I am planning to drop the gym, come the 2016.  It’s a sad, sad thing for me, but the price has gone up ten bucks and, with my new hours at work being adjusted just a bit, the timing doesn’t work well for me anymore.  I get off of work at 3:25 and most of my favorite classes are at 4:30.  That hour in between totally deters me from going since I don’t like sitting around for an hour extra at school.  With my commute on top of that, I’m home late after a long day and it’s just turned into a proposition of guilt for me- guilt for taking time away from my family compounded with the extra cost and me not going often enough for it to make fiscal sense.  The final nail in the coffin was the news that one of my favorite teachers, Emily, won’t be teaching Zumba at my gym anymore.  I plan to look into the LA Fitness that is within walking distance of my house to see if that might suit me better when the gym bug bites again.

With all that in mind, I’m going to use the heck out of the gym over Winter Break.  I figured out that I can go to a number of fabulous body pump, Zumba, booty camp and spin classes during my two weeks off- and there are enough that I can almost go daily during my break.  After that, Bradley and I are going to start doing Daily Burn with our kids and I’m looking into a similar Zumba subscription available online that a good friend of mine has suggested called Shine Dance Fitness.  One of the biggest issues with the gym is how it excludes my whole family.  While I’m not personally responsible for their fitness, when I work out with my and in front of my family they are way more consistent and healthy.  When I do my own thing, Bradley doesn’t work out as much, Gigi and Jude become lumps on the couch and everyone gets grumpy and owly and crabby!  It’s better, I think, when they see me going and kind of guiltily realize they need to move, too.  It’s like, “Ugh.  There goes Mom, again.  Next she’s gonna ask me how I’m going to be active today.  Might as well…”  Or at least, when I see someone gearing up for a workout that’s for sure how I think!  😜 

 {January, September & December of 2015}

Imagine what the comparison pictures could look like between this and next year!  I’m giving myself the rest of this week, then, with break, I’m also hitting the gym.  It should be a lot of fun and hopefully I’ll get close to 190 while also bypassing all of the poor food choices that will be available!