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Mom, Interrupted: I'm sitting and I can't get up, 'The Sequel'

To sum up: Exercise-wise, I’m making improvements, but food-wise, I’m still proceeding at a rate that, if I keep this up, I won’t be able to climb into my Amigo when I’m 70. This month, I vow to not try to figure out a way to box in Virtual Tahiti and eat a bag of chips at the same time.

Last time we talked, I was lying on a picnic blanket, regretting both my lifetime of snarking at Fitness People and my potato chip dependency as I tried to launch myself from a sitting position using my arthritic knees and avoid public humiliation. After discovering that after long years of disuse I had forgotten most of my flexibility, I swore to devote the next month to improving my conditioning, managing my diet, and practicing restraint around anything with "Lays" in the title.

I also promised a full report.

After a solid month of upping my weekly exercise minutes by 102% (and I have the tracking to prove it), I can reveal:

  1. In my search for fitness, I was limited in that I was reluctant to exercise in front of strangers until such time that I felt comfortable being seen in shorts in public. This of course introduced a paradox, similar to The Coffee Dilemma (people who need coffee cannot be expected to make coffee, because they forget to add the coffee or the water or both). 

  2. I addressed The Exercise Paradox with virtual reality, giving myself a decent workout in complete privacy, if you don’t count the dogs watching. That’s okay, because dogs don’t judge.

  3. Then I found an exercise I love. Well, "love" is a strong word. In this context, "love" is shorthand for "I don’t actively hate it while I feel semi-virtuous." But it’s cardio and strength work, which is what this grandma needed.

  4. At this point, exercise is still mostly valuable in that I haven’t found a way to eat while I’m virtually whaling away at boxing targets on a beach in Tahiti. 

  5. And after only 30 days I can report that my UADD (that’s Under Arm Dingle Dangle to you) is measurably reduced. This is a result, as I haven’t gone sleeveless in 15 years.

  6. I may or may not have identified something that all you Fitness People might call an "oblique." I realize that’s highly unlikely, because there’s some menopausal luggage in the way right now, but at least my fat is denting in better places.

  7. My knees are still a little stiff. 

  8. To clarify No. 7: I say "a little" as if I’m feeling a twinge when I do my yoga headstands. In reality, if I sit too long ("too long" equals longer than 15 minutes, apparently) then my knees sound like someone’s crushing soda cans with a bat as I creak out of the chair.

  9. However, items 7 & 8 notwithstanding, my knees have recently held up through a Toddler Triathlon (an afternoon in LegoLand, one touch-a-truck event, and one baby-sitting/bath sprint), which is the bare minimum this grandma is expecting of them at this point. 

To sum up: Exercise-wise, I’m making improvements, but food-wise, I’m still proceeding at a rate that, if I keep this up, I won’t be able to climb into my Amigo when I’m 70. This month, I vow to not try to figure out a way to box in Virtual Tahiti and eat a bag of chips at the same time.

I’ll keep you posted as events warrant. 

Elizabeth Evans is a local mother, wife, daughter, sister, former stay-at-home mom, former work-outside-the-home mom, former work-at-home mom and a human resources consultant.