Weight Loss
You're all in luck today - my cat is sleeping in the closet so it looks like I have time to continue the saga.
We concluded yesterday's chapter with the discontinuation of my gym membership. At first, I was heartbroken. It was like having your best friend ditch you for the cool crowd. Sure, you could still ride your bike past her house and watch her family eat dinner, or you could climb that tree outside her bedroom window and watch her sophisticated new friends give each other bikini waxes at her slumber party, but you knew you could never go back to the days when it was just the two of you building Lego space stations in your basement.
(Note: no parts of this analogy are based on my real life, because 1) my friends were and still are awesome and wouldn't have ditched me for the fast-moving pubic-grooming set, 2) I wasn't allowed to cross the street let alone ride my bike anywhere, and 3) my basement was all kinds of creepy and even I knew better than to build my Lego space station down there [I built it alone in a room with fewer spiders in it])
The morning after my membership expired, I woke up early. Not because I'm a go-getter, but because atop the hill across the street from my apartment there has been an awful machine doing god-knows-what and making terrible sounds from dawn until 11 PM every day of the week except Sunday for the entire time I have been living here. Seriously. Sometimes it sounds like a spaceship, and other times there is this rusty, screeching, clacking conveyor belt that sounds like something you'd hear in a slaughter house only minus the terrified bawling of cattle. But I digress. I awoke to that cloudy feeling of something unsettled in your stomach when you know you're upset about a loss, but you don't immediately recall the source of your grief. Then it hit me. No more gym membership.
I went through the stages of grief pretty rapidly, which in retrospect was either merciful or a sign that I'm mentally unstable.
First, I was in denial. I thought maybe I could keep swiping my card for a few more days before their constantly-malfunctioning system would detect my trespass.
Then I was angry. After all, what kind of sick and twisted institution was this, that they would allow my husband to work out for free just because he is a student, while I, his wife, am forced to grow fatter by the second because they want me to PAY to use their facilities. Shit, they should be paying ME! I am practically a walking advertisement for the benefits of exercising at their gym. Are they trying to create a rift in my marriage by making my husband look like he's out of my league? THE GYM IS TRYING TO MAKE ME GET A DIVORCE.
At this point, I was desperate. I prayed to the universe, and swore that I would sacrifice my first-born child to Ice Bear (to be explained in a future post) if I could just have one more month of the gym. Then I realized the fallacy of this promise, as I am almost certainly completely barren and even if I'm not, the thought of pregnancy and childbirth terrify me so much that it just wasn't going to be a beneficial transaction for me in the long run.
Realizing I was out of options, I spiraled into a severe and profound depression. Woe is me, I thought. I am sentenced to a sedentary life of eating because I'm unhappy, and being unhappy because I eat. This is no way to live.
At my absolute lowest point, I crawled over to the window to curse the cruel sun. As I feebly grasped the windowsill to pull myself to my knees, my eyes fell upon the most beautiful thing I had ever seen: A DOUBLE RAINBOW, ALL THE WAY ACROSS THE SKY! But what did it mean? It meant, friends, that I was to run, run like I had never run before. Run like the wind, run like I was trying to find the end of one of those double rainbows.
So I did what any rational person would do, and I heeded the rainbows' call. I laced up my shoes, and I ran. As it turns out, I never needed that dumb old gym as much as it needed me. It was really more like the gym was that socially awkward, needy kid who follows you like a hungry puppy because you're too nice to reject them, so when you finally manage to shake them you feel so FREE and ALIVE, like you could do anything!
The thing I realized about running outside, though, is that you have to time it properly. You have to get out there and put in your miles before that bastard sun gets too high and sets everything on fire. If you've never had heat exhaustion, it feels a lot like a hangover but worse, because you can't even reflect on the hazy memories of how awesome you were the night before. You're basically being punished severely for trying to do something good. We all know that nothing tastes as good as thin feels, but the blinding skull-pain of heat exhaustion makes it hard to enjoy checking out your fine self in the mirror. Thus, running in the morning turns out to be the only option.
Because of this limited window of opportunity, you come to value running more. Like that old socially awkward friend, the gym was always there waiting for you. You could go whenever you felt like it, and if you didn't show up at all, well, the poor jerk would still be waiting for you the next day. Running, however, is nobody's bitch. You don't do it in the morning? Sorry, too late. You don't do it one day because you figure you can do it the next? Guess what, asshole, it's going to rain tomorrow.
Before you know it, running has made YOU its bitch. But that's not without its perks. Weight loss, for one. When I started running two weeks ago, I weighed 250 pounds. Now I'm down to a size 2.*
But the fun side effects of running don't end there. It turns out I had much, much, oh so much more to learn. Stay tuned for the conclusion of this tale.
*Results not typical. Or real at all, in any way. But I think I lost 2 pounds.
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