Personal trainers;re-gaining that which has been LOST

These are my personal trainers. I found them by the road.

They don’t wear Spandex. They don’t swan around, showing off their ripped abs. They don’t have books in development.

They don’t scream at me; they work for kibbles. They’re so pleased when I walk even a little bit that their tails go in circles. (I’d like to see Jillian Michaels do that!)

What more do you need, other than shoes and leashes? Thirty

minutes a day, and you’re all happier, healthier and, we hope, a mite leaner. I have so missed any kind of exercise while I’ve had the cold of the century for the past two weeks that I actually can’t wait to get out with them today. And not just so I can eat more.

I’ve been using — not even sneaking — my “gateway drugs” of refined carbs, sugar and computer solitaire to slip farther down the slippery slope of packing weight back on. However, it’s not my fault. None of it.

Tara Parker-Pope’s lengthy and very disheartening “The Fat Trap,” published in the New York Times at the end of December, says, in effect, that I’m fighting my own body, that researchers are finding very real metabolic changes in those who’ve recently lost weight, changes that make it tough to lose more. Sigh. On top of the holidays, feeling poopy, my body is readying for future famine. Not bloody likely, but there you have it: “a biological and metabolic backlash triggered by weight loss.”

Ever since I got serious about getting smaller, keeping a food log, eating better and exercising, I’ve had to fight the urge to tell people it’s what I “do” when they ask. But, seriously, it’s a job. I wasn’t successful when I had jobs or even when I had children at home.

I have to be one of those vigilant people she describes “who are never NOT thinking about food” in order to keep off the weight, and I can’t always do that (holidays or vacations, for instance).  

To paraphrase Parker-Pope, she’s not going to give up on her own weight loss, she’s going to continue to eat well and to exercise, but she’s not going to be so hard on herself when she backslides in one way or another.  Me, too, what she said.