The road to hell is paved with good intentions (and food poisoning)

I am so good at sabotaging myself, I am thinking of teaching it as a half-day course. “The art of being completely counter-productive and simultaneous self-loathing,” I shall call it. Except that that’s entirely too long, and I’m thinking no one is actually going to pay to learn what seems to come so naturally to so many of us. Damn.

As I have discussed here before, I do not own a scale. What I do own is Wii Fit and it’s companion, the Dirty Lying Balance Board. Earlier this year when we were actively striving to lose weight, I became accustomed to regular weighings on the balance board to track my progress. After I lost the weight and slowly fell back into my old habits of all-day-on-the-computer with all-evening-on-the-couch as a chaser, I stopped weighing myself. To be clear: I was actually too lazy to bother weighing myself. And anyway, everything still fit just fine, I was maintaining, so no biggie.

But then last week I swore to get more active, so I figured I’d better at least get a baseline, just so I could track any weight changes. Curiosity, you understand. And so I stepped on the Dirty Lying Balance Board…

… and it insisted that I’d gained five pounds. FIVE. POUNDS. Half the weight I’d lost! I may have invented some new words that day. None of them can be said in polite company.

Now, I was weighing myself during a heat wave, after a night when I’d had both wine and popcorn (alcohol and salt, yum), and my wedding ring was feeling a little tight. So I knew it was likely water weight. But still. Talk about a smack in my couch-potato face. I panicked.

I got myself back on the elliptical for the first time in months. I drank water all day long and paid a little more attention to what else I was putting in my mouth. And two days and about a gazillion pee-stops later (you’re welcome!) those supposed five pounds were gone, but it was a pretty good jump-start to getting back on the fitness train, I suppose.

So I rode the elliptical every other day and I walked my son to school, and slowly my muscles started remembering what it’s like to move.

And then yesterday I had a little bit of food poisoning, or maybe it was a bug? I don’t know, and I’ll spare you the details, but suffice it to say that I did not walk my son to school today, given that traveling from the bed to my desk felt like a Herculean task, already. The last thing I want to do today is exercise. Yet part of me feels like, “Hey, back on the horse! Keep moving!” and the other part responds, “Shut up, I just need to lie down and maybe die.”

I’m thinking of cutting my brain a deal: nap now, walk later. That’s fair, right?