#101 days a gym rat

I’m finally learning how to use Instagram. Today is day 14 of what I intend to be 101 consecutive days at the YMCA, and I also intend that people know just how hard I’m working at this. I want to be a healthy eating and exercising rock star, if not to an audience of millions, then to myself. I can do this.

The idea came from several places. Someone else did it for 100 days and people cheered. More importantly (I guess, said the narcissist reluctantly), I thought it would help me establish a pattern of exercising, get me used to going day after day after day until it really does become part of my routine. Most importantly, I’m hoping it will encourage me — again — that this journey is taken step by step. There is magic, but it’s s-l-o-o-o-o-w magic.

In two weeks I’ve dropped 6 pounds. Only 14 to go to where I was before the cancer business and then another 20 to my Weight Watchers goal. But it happens day by day, like the racking up of Y visits. In my heart I feel as though I’ve been doing this for months (do you think perhaps hysteria might play a role here?). In my head I know it’s a few days out of the rest of my life. And, according to our family doctor, the older we get, the more we must work at this.

I scratched a bug bite last night and discovered that my back muscles are more defined (who ever looks at her own back?) than the last time I scratched my back. I returned to Cycle class yesterday morning and not only lived through it but pulled 30 minutes worth of weeds in the afternoon (and it was all steel-stemmed Johnson grass).

I’m trying to vary workouts — classes and machines — as much as possible, logging in each day’s exercise like the obsessive-compulsive I want to be. I did some Tai Chi movements. I’ve folded myself into origami in yoga. I’ve gone back to Body Pump. Maybe someday I’ll even try Body Combat although I’ve always avoided classes with Combat or Mayhem in the name. I am going to have someone tutor me in the elliptical on which you can lengthen your stride and in power lifting.

Some of it will be repetitive which is not a bad thing, according to an article I read today while waiting for a flat to be fixed. This Family Circle magazine list of tips to get and stay slim even recommended eating the same thing for lunch every day. You won’t be tempted off the straight and narrow, was the reasoning, if you’re fixing (doing) the same thing every day. And, of course, we know that the only way to break bad habits and build good ones is repetition, repetition, repetition.

You can find me on Instagram @jbgrose or the hashtag above. Why don’t you join me and start posting your own sweaty pix? I’ll race you to Nov. 25.