Wedding Wednesday 4/54

I thought it was 3/54. Yikes!

So now that there's 50 weeks to go, let's talk about exercise.
Oh hells yeah. It's another ugly truth, second only to my credit card debt.

Last night I half-heartedly did some pilates. Then the DVD skipped and froze with about 20 minutes left in the workout and I gave up to go downstairs and eat my weight in orzo tossed with lemon juice and feta cheese (one of the few perks left of living at home is my mother's cooking! too bad it is served with a helping of drama almost every night!!).

I actually planned to wake up at 6 this morning and work out some more. My alarm goes off at 6 anyway and I usually laze about in bed for 45 minutes, thinking about how I should get on the 6:43 train, but I'm just too tired and there's one at 7:38 which gets me to work at a respectable 8:30. I figured I could just get up at 6, do some exercise and get on the 7:38 as usual. Right?

Well this morning the alarm went off and I had this vague sensation that my uterus was trying to expel itself from my body. Too much information? Eh, sorry. Seriously though, I was felled completely by these cramps - I felt like lying prone and motionless in bed was the only way to remedy them. I laid like this until 7, thinking I could get up and dressed in 15 minutes and get out the door. Yeah right. The first draft of air to hit my midsection was torment. "aaaffhhhhgggg" I groaned. I started to make my way to the bathroom at a snail's pace, came back at a snail's pace, began dressing...maybe a turtle's pace: slow but deliberate. I had laid out my outfit the night before - black tights, dependable black skirt, new gray silky blouse from Ann Taylor Loft and my short sleeve cardi, best clothing investment of 2009. The tights were freakin' CONTROL TOP or some sh*t because they took a full 10 minutes to get on. That's when I realized I'd have to take the 8:03 train, no way was I gonna make the 7:38.

I proceeded to dress slowly (oh and you may ask why I didn't take a NSAID like any normal girl, especially given the jumbo bottle of aleve I always carry in my purse? I'm supposed to donate platelets today and can't take anything except tylenol 48 hours before donation. And tylenol is too weak to cross the threshold of our house apparently. And because I enjoy pain, I suffered instead of cancelling my donation and throwing three aleve down the hatch. Honestly, I know I am way better off than the people who actually need my platelets to, you know, SURVIVE! I just like being dramatic about my punctuation. ahahaha.). I decided that I would put on makeup this morning, even primer AND foundation, the works. When I stepped back to look in the mirror I decided I looked like a demented cross between Madame Audel, the octogenarian widow in Chocolat and Emma Pillsbury, the neurotic but lovable school counselor on Glee. I tucked in my shirt. It helped. About a .05% improvement. I put on wedge heels. Another .05% improvement. Then I stopped caring and left for work.

I thought I looked decent until I encountered "Statuesque" She's this girl who's worked on my floor for the past 4 1/2 years but has never spoken to me (ok she spoke to me once. She got engaged the week after me and was talking about it in the kitchen, and my boss at the time said "Oh! Everyone's getting engaged! Allison got engaged last week!" She turned and said, "You're engaged?!" I mean she could've just said, "Who the hell would marry you?" because that's what her tone was like. Anyways) so she's never spoken to me despite our mysteriously similar daily pee schedule. She got married last weekend and my coworkers were like "OhMAHGAH I bet her wedding was beautiful and she was beautiful because she is so tall and so skinny and so statuesque" OK. While none of this is untrue, it makes it hard to encounter her sometimes.

So here I am looking like a cross between a French widow and someone with way too many embellisments on their blouse and I encounter statuesque, who of course, looks like a rockstar. She is wearing pants that look suspiciously like the elastic-waistbanded pants to which my sister and I lovingly refer as our "turkey pants" - you know, the pants you bring to Thanksgiving at your grandma's house so you can take off your cute outfit after dinner and change into something that accomodates your gut, temporarily expanded by your food baby? Yeah, you know. So yeah, she's in turkey pants and this really ugly purple sweater. Except she looks beautiful. Because she's statusesque. Next to her, I look like a very short....whatever. Meh.

The thing is for the most part, I'm not totally unhappy with my general physique. I am not tall and I am not skinny, but I look "athletic." Yes there are some things that are a bit wobbly. I wouldn't mind toning them up in the next 50 weeks. I have already revealed that I will be wearing a spanx under my wedding dress. My friend turned up her nose. "You are supposed to look hot as hell under that dress" she said. Uh, "hot as hell" for my fiance, who is not only of the male species (ie appreciates lingerie for about 2 seconds before wanting to rip it off) but has already seen my naked, for the minute or so after I take my dress off at the end of the day, OR "uniform silhouette" for the potentially hundreds of pictures that may be snapped and put on facebook within 24 hours? UM I CHOOSE HOTNESS FOR PICTURES.

Back to the bod, so yeah, the spanx will help out, but all in all I probably should try to be a little healthier in general. A diet alone probably won't work. Why? Because I've tried that sort of thing and I just end up cranky and weighing the same. I have weighed 160 since I graduated college 5 years ago and have not fluctuated since. I trained for a half MARATHON and did not lose any weight. Though as Jamaal pointed out, I probably lost fat and gained muscle, because I did like how my booty looked after that experience. But being 5'6'' and 160 (and yes, I do lie every week at platelet donation and say I weigh 150. Why? Because Jamaal is 5'6" and weight 160 and weighing as much as he does depresses me and I can get away with 150!!!) puts me, according to my doctor, in the first little box on the "overweight" graph. Every year at my physical she raises and eyebrow, pops her hip out of the side of her five foot nothing 100-pound frame and says "for health reasons, you could stand to slim down."

UGH.

I've avoided her for this long, but maybe I should actually try it this time? Honestly, I probably didn't lose weight when I was training for the half marathon because I used that as an excuse to eat just about anything I wanted. I thought that training for the Boston Marathon in 2010 might help me achieve the wedding-worthy physique I was seeking, but shin splints sidelined me two months ago. There is no way I could build up my strength in time to train for the marathon (which makes me sad, I really wanted to run it) nevermind what my orthopedist would have to say about doing something like that now. What to do, what to do.

I'll tell you what I'm gonna do.

I've started the Couch to 5K program. Yeah, I hate starting from square one. I used to think of myself as a runner, no matter how slow I had become over the years. I used to be able to just decide that I was going to train for a race and go out and hit the pavement for a six mile run. Not so anymore. My orthopedist told me that if I ever wanted to run again, I had to take teeny tiny baby steps. No more big stuff till the shin splints are healed, because if I don't respect the 'splints, my tibia will break. So I started Week 1 on Monday, alternating jogging and walking. I felt the gnawing pain in my shin, but got through it without any after effects, so I think this could work. Maybe I will even run a 5K at the end of the plan and once again, feel like "a runner."

I'm also doing some pilates. I bought a pilates ring a while ago after seeing one on the Martha Stewart Show. Martha showed how it was great at toning the inner thigh (which was almost too much info for me, personally). The DVD that it came with was good, but as I mentioned about, it skips. I downloaded this for $9 yesterday. Normally I wouldn't pay for something like this, but downloading it meant that I could watch these ladies on my computer AS WELL AS put the vid on my iPod, which is key. The pilates ring is portable and you can throw it in a suitcase easily, so when I go to visit Jamaal in NYC, I can bring it along and get the workouts in.

I also dig MTV pilates and MTV yoga with Kristen McGee, so hopefully I'll integrate those into my workout as well. I also have this really quick and easy strength-training circuit that I ripped out of Real Simple that actually works. I know this because I was getting a facial and while D was massaging my shoulders and arms she was like "damn. you been working out? I can feel your muscles!!" That will have to be worked into the routine too.

We'll see how it goes. I'm not so obsessed with losing weight, though it might be nice to drop those pounds to get my doctor off my back. Personally I'd rather lose inches and get into some of the clothes I've been keeping year after year thinking I'll get them back on. I'd also love to have a routine where I do the pilates and yoga in the morning and come home and just have to do cardio. I have a hard time with motivation though.

Jamaal promises that when he moves up here, we'll work out together, which I know is true. When we're alone we tend to just do our own thing, but I know together we will kick each other's asses. I've promised not to make him run, but he's the type of guy who will prod me at 6am to get up to go to the gym, and I can work on the treadmill while he lifts. Or does whatever those guys do who are always at the gym and not running or on the elliptical. Maybe I will solve a mystery there. Until then, I do need to do something, for my own health if not for anything else. I have noticed since I stopped exercising my blood pressure slowly creeping up for 90/60 to 110/70 - not necessarily bad at all, but I know it's from doing no cardio. And like I said, stuff is flabby. These types, despite being control top, do not suck the thigh meat in sufficiently, and the whole hall can hear me walking to the bathroom as I swish swish swish my way there. Perhaps this explains Statuesque's disdain for me. Ha ha ha.