I don’t consider myself old by any means but when I was younger I never had to worry about my weight. I was always looking good and wore what I wanted to wear while I ate massive amounts of chips, chocolate bars, and soda like they were going out of style.
I pretty much worked all day and danced all night. I was always on the go and always had real high self esteem.
Then I slowed down my partying to a reasonable rate and wasn’t dancing as much. I ended up moving from a very physically demanding job to a less physical – sitting in front of a computer – job that I still enjoyed my junk food at.
The months went by and before I knew what was happening I couldn’t fit in to my favorite pair of jeans and I could no longer make the buttons connect on my knee length sweater. In fact, I couldn’t even get it around my circumference, it was just too small.
So I headed 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 satisfied with my weight and my gym membership ran out I put working out on the back-burner and grabbed my chocolate bar.
Quickly, I went past the not being able to zip 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 harder than I had ever worked out before. I lost the weight and stopped going to the gym again.
Soon I was in the – I’m not even going to begin 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 while I may lose the weight I will eventually get tired of the gym, stop going, gain even more weight back and continue this process till the day I die!
So I stopped going altogether and bought 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. Truthfully walking on the treadmill was usually the most I pushed myself. My heartbeat never had a chance to get pumping 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 very 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 partying and eating anything I wanted. True, I probably would have added on even more if I had not done my yo-yo gym routines but to be honest it was getting harder if not impossible to get the weight off 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 when I first started. Even at my job I was lifting, pushing, and pulling. In fact, cardio was boring to me in the gym and I could only make it through the recommended ten minutes of warm-up most of the time. I would then push myself on the weights and literally exhaust myself with them. And that’s when the light bulb turned on.
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 ads 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 thought 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 way to lose weight but building muscle is essential 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 in the comfort of your own home by using the proper techniques and routines.
Now I actually have a productive workout at home schedule and I don’t have to sign up with gym anymore.
I obtained the step by step plan I required to apply to my life and cut out the yo-yo workout routine I was trapped in from http://getfit-4-life.com.