- Share This Post
- submit
- 8
-
Sparkle (0)
Update (now with drawings!)
Last week we launched BlogHer's 2008 Good Health-a-thon, which is all about getting healthy in the new year. Now, the very sound, very inspiring premise of the 'thon is that there are lots of ways we can focus on getting healthy in the new year that don't revolve around weight loss. Indeed, there are plenty of ways to measure "health" that don't require a bathroom scale.
(This is especially helpful if you ah, happened to throw your scale out of the bathroom one day in a hysterical fit inspired by oh, I dunno...let's say a grapefruit diet gone awry.)
(Stupid grapefruit.)
So anyway, yay! Good health! No scales!
Well, except.
It turns out that my own very personal goals actually do involve weight loss, and (more specifically) getting into better physical shape. And so I thought a good first step would be to hire myself a personal trainer.
Or, more accurately, I decided that I wasn't throwing nearly enough money at my weight-loss efforts.
Sure, I thought, I am donating huge sums of money to my gym every month, but what I want to know is: how can I spend even MORE money to get exactly NO results? Surely there must be a way to keep my ass and boobs inflating at a frightening rate!
And then it occurred to me.
I KNOW! I did not exclaim, because I was totally doing this at work and people would have stared at me. I could hire a personal trainer!
And lo, one of the most disastrous work-outs of my life ensued. (And this is really saying something. See historic reference.)
To put this in perspective, you need to understand that I am a single, thirtysomething chick who is cute but also overweight because shutup. That is not the point. The point IS, by this phase in my life, I know a thing or two about diet and exercise.
(Note: KNOWING them does not mean I APPLY them, but if I applied them I wouldn't be writing this, and you would totally be missing out.)
Anyway.
I decided to troll Craigslist to find myself a trainer. And if you have ever scoured Craigslist looking for a nice, normal person, you know perfectly well that I was setting myself up for failure from the beginning.
My criteria were that the trainer needed to be at least somewhat affordable, somewhat local, and somewhat...how do you say?...articulate. (Hey, I do not need my trainer to be a literary marvel; I simply want my trainer to use things like both nouns and verbs, which was surprisingly hard to find. Well, especially because I also sought the occasional punctuation mark. Example of non-effective advertising: "I will u in ur home or office make u hotter then u ever been b4!")
So after wading through the ninetyhundred ULTIMATE POWER DIESEL EXTREME ROCKHARD KICKASS FEEL THE BURN WORKOUT OF UR LIFE EXPERIENCE ads, I found a guy who was all like, "Hey, I can help you." So I contacted him.
We spoke.
He was nice.
We agreed to meet for a "consultation."
Let me just say right here that the "consultation" was fantastic. The trainer was cute and sweet and seemed all genuinely concerned about me and my goals and my out-of-shapeness. He seemed to want the same things for me that I wanted. And when we got to the stickier subjects, the ones I was afraid would be nightmarish, he eased my fears completely.
"So, uh, do I have to like, weigh in?" I asked, resigned.
"Oh, no! We don't do weigh-ins! Or fat calculations! Or BMI measurements! Most of those metrics are arbitrary!" he replied.
(He didn't actually say those all in exclamations, but for how good it sounded, he may as well have. I all but swooned.)
And then he went in for the kill --
"The best judge of progress is how you feel in your clothes. You'll know how you're coming along."
WOW! HOW FANASTIC! I was totally sold. And then I asked the next question, just to be sure I wasn't dreaming.
"What about diet and nutrition?"
"Let's not worry about that just yet," he said. "What's most important right now is that we get you more active and feeling better," he said.
Uh huh. So I went back the next night for our first session.
It happened in two parts.
PART ONE: THE NUTRITION DISCUSSION
Remember how just like, three lines ago my sweet trainer was
