Lesson #52: If you don't want to do something, one excuse is as good as another.

I bought my very own gym membership a couple of months ago. The gym by my house opened up a brand-fangled-new location near my workplace (in another city), so I canceled the membership by my house and started anew by my workplace, thinking, of course, that I would go more often that way.

We excuse our sloth under the pretext of difficulty.  ~Marcus Fabius Quintilian

I did go, once, the week after I opened the account. It was a beautiful facility, pristine and shiny, no shoe marks on the floor or sweat stains on the equipment. All the equipment worked. I loved it.

Several excuses are always less convincing than one.  ~Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point

Then the excuses started.

1. I just had out-patient surgey and I'm not able to take a shower or submerged bath for a week.
2. My wound is still healing.
3. My wound has healed but I'm still sore and I can't wear a sports bra.
4. I have a head cold.
5. Husband is going out of town for work for a week, possibly longer, and I don't have long to say goodbye.
6. I have to be home in time to cover kids sporting events and classes.
7. I have to help K fill out his financial aid paperwork for college.
8. Someone has to make dinner.
9. Someone has to do the laundry.
10. It's too damn hot.
11. I have to work late tonight, and tomorrow night, and next week.
12. All I want is a beer.

He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else.  ~Benjamin Franklin

Then I looked up all these great quotes on excuses, and realized, I'm not the only one who does such horrible things, or else there wouldn't be so many fabulous quotes about the activity! So, if you're looking for an excuse not to go to the gym (or some other thing you should be doing), you can pick one of mine, or make up your own. (Let me know in the comments section what you're favorite excuses are.)
  

Lesson #20: McDonald's *will* make you fat

This week my office started a Biggest Loser contest.

I could say it wasn't my idea, and at the inception, it wasn't, but I just happened to have experience in this sort of thing. My two bosses happened to be talking about needing to lose weight and I happened to hear them and I happened to butt in and say, "Hey, we should have a Biggest Loser contest!"

I got the idea from a cool little paper I used to write for. Three years ago we had an eerily similar contest there, about which I wrote a little blog. It was great fun. I lost around 12 pounds in the contest as I recall.

So, in my new office, we set up the rules in the same vein as the last contest. We weigh in during staff meetings. We track each other's progress (gains and losses) on a white board in a public room. We try to undermine one another with mockery and temptation (one of my bosses' birthday cake sits mostly uneaten in the fridge as I write this).

Weight.

I can't believe I'm blogging about this again!

Three years ago, I weighed 172 in January, the most I'd ever weighed and the same weight I'd clocked in the hospital before I gave birth to one of my sons. After the contest I was down to around 160, and a stressful divorce and move cross country with the kids helped me to pare down some more. I took a summer off and spent two or three hours a day at the gym, until I reached my lowest weight -- 145 -- around December of that year. Though that might still sound heavy to some people, at 145 I wear a size 6, have cleavers for cheek bones and look sickly. 150 is actually my ideal weight.

A year and a half ago I began a full-time load to finish my undergrad degree, and in that time I have put on 25 pounds. You tack on the fact that I adopted an unnatural love of cheap and easy fast food and it's no wonder I am not my blithe self anymore.

It is truly unfortunate. I literally worked my ass off to lose that weight. I turn my back for one second and it all comes piling back on.

So, it's a Biggest Loser contest for me once again. I didn't win the money pot last time, and I might not win again, but it certainly helped get me started.

So here's to another good beginning.