Fat Girl Fitness

I like exercise. Okay, some mornings I don’t feel like I want to do it and it’s kind of a chore, but overall, I like it. I like moving my body and I like the health benefits from it.

For about a year, I’ve been struggling with my workouts. Part of the problem was working full-time. I wasn’t exactly skilled at working in 20-30 minutes of movement after working all day (I sure as heck wasn’t getting up any earlier to do it before I left for the cube). The other part has been trying to find a workout routine that I can stick to.

FitTV was my main source of my workout. Remember that channel? It’s Discovery Health now. I did a belly dance workout every morning. When Fit TV took it off the air, they put several other shows in the time slot that mixed cardio kickboxing, Bollywood dancing, Latin dance, hip hop dance, and cardio sculpting. The days that they aired segments I didn’t like, I did yoga. It was working really nicely, or so I thought, until Oprah needed to have her own network and ruined mine.

So since then, I’ve really been struggling with finding something to do that I like, that I will do every day, that will help me achieve my goal of losing the forty pounds I put back on after I lost it in the first place.

At the end of October I took another setback when I hurt my knee. My already sporadic fitness routine ended up practically non-existent as I struggled to find exercises that I could do that wouldn’t further injure my knee.

All of this struggling and lack of progress took its toll on my self-esteem. And it’s pretty common that the worse you feel about yourself, the less likely you are to be motivated to be do anything about it. Frustration has a tendency to negatively affect my productivity.

But with the new year comes a new opportunity, or at least, that’s what it feels like. For some reason that symbolic restart was just what I needed to clear out some of my baggage and get back on the fitness horse once again. I still haven’t come up with a routine that I like and that I’ve stuck to, but I’m working on it.

I’m going back to basics and taking my own advice. First thing I’ve got to do is get into the habit of moving again, five days a week, no exceptions. My knee is healing and feeling better. I can do more now (wearing a brace during exercise helps). I need to take advantage of that. I need to move. Dancing (free style and belly), stretching, and yoga every morning should do it. These are all things I like. There’s no excuse for me not to do them.

Once I get that rhythm going, then adding in some weights in the afternoon won’t be a big deal. The one thing that retail offered me was that I could work out in the morning, then I’d be walking around when I was at work at night at least a couple of days a week. Writing, I tend to be planted in front of my computer for most of the day. A little sculpting in the afternoon would be a nice way to get the blood flowing and break up some of the afternoon slog.

I’m a big advocate for fat girl fitness. I give my fat girl friends fitness advice all the time. I’ve been doing this for years and I like to share my experience. It’s so easy to be overwhelmed with all of the information. It’s so easy to look at DVD taught by some skinny chick who’s never been fat a day in her life and think that you can’t do that. However, when some practical advice comes from a fat girl, someone who lives with it and struggles with it and does it anyway, it’s a little more encouraging.

This fat girl needs to listen to her own advice and stop over-thinking things. No, I’m not at the fitness level I was a few years ago and that’s frustrating. No, I’m not at the weight I was a few years ago and that’s frustrating. But I know how to get both of those things back, now don’t I? I’ve done it before.

So, shut up, listen, and do it. No excuses.