We All Want Our Thighs To Fit Into Our Jeans
I don’t consider myself old by any means but when I was younger I never thought about my weight. I was always looking good and wore what I wanted to wear while stuffing myself with chips, chocolate bars, and soda as a staple food item.
I pretty much worked all day and partied all night. I was always busy and always had real high self esteem.
Then I slowed down my partying to a reasonable rate and wasn’t dancing as much. I eventually moved from a very physically demanding job to a less physical – sitting in front of a computer – job that still had a place for me to keep my junk food.
Time went on and before I knew what was happening I no longer could fit in to my favorite pair of jeans and I could no longer button up my knee length sweater. In fact, I couldn’t even wrap it around me, it was just too small.
So I started going to the gym. The first year I melted off the gained weight quickly and built up some muscle. I looked and felt better than I had before I even gained the weight in the first place. So once I was happy with my weight and my gym membership expired I took working out off the to do list and grabbed my chocolate bar.
Soon I had gone past the not being able to button up the pants era and entered the – I can’t get the pants past my thigh – era. So I found a different gym.
I remember the first time I went to that gym and stepped on the scale and truthfully thought to myself that the scale must be broken. I worked out like I had never worked out before. I lost the weight and ended my gym routine again.
Soon I was in the – I’m not even going to attempt to try to put those jeans on – era. And back to another gym I went. But this time I wasn’t excited about it because I knew that even though I may lose the weight I will ultimately get bored with the gym, stop going, gain even more weight back and continue this process till the day I die!
So I quit the gym completely and purchased a treadmill and some free weights. I had been on the treadmill off and on for a few years when I realized I had gained another twenty pounds that I needed to get off. To be honest walking on the treadmill was usually the most I pushed myself. My heartbeat never had a chance to get up there because I never let it.
So I went out and bought an elliptical. That would for sure get my heart rate pumping I told myself. But it’s quite easy to get lost in music land and just kind of robotically move your feet on an elliptical with not much effort.
Well let’s just say I became forty pounds heavier than the days of dancing and eating whatever I wanted. True, I probably would have gained even more if I had not done my yo-yo gym routines but honestly it was getting harder if not impossible to lose the weight and I was at a loss of what I was doing wrong. It used to be so easy for me.
After talking about it with my husband I realized that I used to do a lot of weights in my early years. Even at my job I was lifting, pushing, and pulling. In fact, cardio had been boring to me in the gym and I could only make it through the recommended ten minutes of warm-up most times. I would then push myself on the weights and literally exhaust myself with them. And that’s when it clicked.
I hadn’t been doing a weight routine because we have free weights and I didn’t know how to utilize them properly. I had seen the commercials for the resistance band, and the exercise ball, and even the use your own body weight for building muscle but I was tricked into thinking that the gym was the only place I could get a good weight workout. I also believed that cardio was the key point in losing weight. Somewhere along the line I had learned this about cardio and embedded it into my brain.
Now I know it’s not true. Not only is cardio not the only part to losing weight but building muscle is vital to losing weight and being healthy.
And you don’t have to head out to the gym to achieve it. You can get the same muscle building and fat burning workout at home by using the proper techniques and schedule.
Now I actually have a productive workout at home schedule and I don’t have to sign up with gym anymore.
I found the step by step routine I required to apply to my life and cut out the yo-yo workout routine I was stuck in from http://getfit-4-life.com.