That title sounds serious and academic and I don't think this post is going to actually go there but let's see. Maybe it'll earn a colon: and a subtitle. Hee hee.
Because it's winter break still for a few days, I've been spending a lot of time
1. going to doctor's appointments
2. exercising by playing virtual reality games on my headset. This includes Beat Saber and Supernatural (which is unrelated to the TV show, and I'm not sure entirely why they picked that name because it's always confusing to people.) This time around it also included a game called Maestro, which is pretty fun-- you are directing a symphonic orchestra to mostly classical music-- but that one is a lot lower key as far as the cardio goes.
I've been doing virtual/at home workouts now since about 2021, when I started dancing to Just Dance. I kind of love almost everything about it because it's really convenient (I don't have to drive to a gym-- I just go upstairs to my game room and put on a headset). I think I need to add some kind of weight-training component to it, but that's a different post for a different day.
This duality of time spent over my break is important because I'm trying, really hard, to get fit. I'm not really trying to get skinny, (although who is gonna lie that in the modern era, skinny equates in most people's head to fit and chonky cannot ever be fit, in spite of all kinds of lies and statistics about BMI and cardio and other things like middle-aged women and menopause and all that jazz). I would not HATE being skinny and fit. I'd really just like to LOOK to people like I work out as much as I do.
Cause seriously. During the school year, most days, I get up at 5:30 AM so I can get a 30-minute cardio session before I go to work. That's pretty darn dedicated, and it's actually quite an intense workout if done correctly. To give a little data, my Apple Watch right now says my workout today burned 756 calories, and I've gotten in about 8,300 steps so far today (and yes, I know that the 10,000 steps guidance was created by a pedometer company to drive sales, but it's not the worst benchmark I've ever seen for fitness). And before the day is over, I'll probably manage to get in about those 10,000 steps.
And my heart rate ranged from 94 to 161 BPM. Which for a chonky middle-aged woman is right in the zone I want. It's going a little bit anaerobic there at the top, but that wasn't for very long, and it's perfect for interval training.
So, where am I going with all of this? In 2021, when I first started this virtual fitness quest, I lost about 30 pounds. It was mostly pandemic gained weight from stress, chili cheese fries, and a lot of really good ice cream, so it came off pretty fast once I really started exercising. But then it STOPPED. Like seriously, nothing I did, from dropping the calorie count down really low (my husband, for example, lost 50 pounds on the same diet as mine and at first on that diet he wasn't even working out, like for the first 20 pounds or so it was just the food difference). I tried keto. I tried intermittent fasting. I got vitamin shots from a "diet doctor," and I went to TWO different nutritionists. They took my metabolic rate, gave me a plan that you could have gotten out of Women's Day Weekly (the January edition-- in other words, not all that different from something you could have gotten for 2.50 in the checkout counter).
And no matter what I did for like two years I did not lose ANYTHING. And then, last year, it slowly started to creep back on. The weight. I was still working out, still have a great VO2 measurement on my Apple Watch and still can mostly run up stairs. But the weight started coming back, as it does.
And I've been so frikkin' frustrated. I can say all I want that I'm just exercising for the fitness, and that's not untrue. But honestly, I want to LOOK fit, and I don't want doctors to write that really rude word on my chart that rhymes with shmobese. I don't want them to be surprised when they run my heart rate and it's good. Because they think I'm lying about how much I exercise.
Anyway. The final tie in here is that I went to a new family practice doctor and instantly liked her. And she listens, and she did blood work, and she gave me a medication because I've been, for several years, slightly on the edge of having serious insulin resistance. Which means, as she said, that I've been "fighting with my genetics." THANK YOU. That's what I've been saying!!! I don't know why I haven't been given this medication before.
I've taken it now for three days and even if it doesn't do anything metabolically (which I have to say I actually think it already is. There's a certain "tautness" to my skin when I've exercised productively, and I've been missing it for a long time.)
But even if it doesn't actually mean much for the chemical balance in my body, my mental feelings at working out have radically changed the last three times. I feel GOOD about it. It's not a sludge slog that I don't think is going to work anyway. I've got so much energy and I feel like I could keep going, even though I'm tired and sweaty and need to take a long bubble bath.
If that doesn't help in some way (placebo effect is fine with me if it placebos something) then I'll eat my hat. (I don't own very many hats, either, so it'll be a fuzzy winter one.)
I want to say that I don't care about the weight loss but I'm gonna be totally honest that I do care. At least a little bit. I'm hopeful that I can just get to a place where I look like someone who plays volleyball or something. Who can pull a plow while holding several babies. Who can make a lot of pancakes and feed a whole army without getting too tired. Who knows the difference between dark clouds that are going nowhere and the ones that are gonna lead to the scent of petrichor soon cause there's a rain coming, and we need to get the laundry in. (I dunno. Farm girl stuff.)
And if this medication works, and it's an old one, not a newfangled expensive thing that every Hollywood someone has been doing, then I'm going to have some strong words for the doctors that wouldn't listen to me in the last few years when I asked if there was something we could try.
And I'm still gonna keep beat sabering those little triangles away, and whacking those balloons with baseball style bats. Cause fitness is fun, and I suddenly have a tiny little spark of hope.
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