Marching Into The Peace Corps, pt 15: It’s A Move It To Lose It Kind Of World
There’s a certain amount of subliminal messages being sent by the diet pill industry: “take our product and you’ll be skinny and ripped”. On some rational level we know this is false, but our emotional side opens the wallet and plunks down the cash. You cannot get great muscle tone from a bottle, only from working out. You have to move and sweat if you want jaws to drop and tongues to wag as you walk by, and that’s a fundamental truth.
Everyone at one time or another considers joining the Peace Corps, but of all the sites on the web, no one talks about their journey to enlist. Follow this extended series of honest articles and you will know for yourself what it takes!
I must confess I love watching (or should I say listening) to infomercials for a variety of reasons. One, it reminds me of my own stupid purchases. As Robin Williams joked in his “Live On Broadway” special, “You should take the ab belt that shocks you’re a** and wrap it around your forehead, turn it on and repeat to yourself, ‘I…will…not…buy…stupid…shit…again!’” Two, when I don’t want to watch anything but I want background noise, I tune them in. Three, when I want to see the latest tripe or fine tune my ears to get past the dieting lies, I go search them out so I keep up to date on the emotional pitch being used by advertisers.
It’s therapeutic to admit to one’s own dumb purchases that play on your emotional desires, so let me slide back the confessional curtain and step inside and admit to my stupidities.
- I bought the ab belt and didn’t get six pack abs; I got uncomfortably shocked and a few burn marks/welts on my stomach. Dumb!
- I’ve got several fad diet books; most have been consigned to the trash. Among them are Atkins, the Rotation Diet, Pritikin Diet, Perricone Diet, The Fat Flush Plan, The Liver Diet, and Michael Thurman’s 6 Week Body Makeover to name a few.
- I tried the aloe vera gel drinks, the protein powders, every over the counter diet pill and vitamin under the sun.
- I wore the “solar suits” that make you sweat like a rain forest (and stink like a skunk) while I rode an exercise bike. This was just gross.
- I paid for hypnosis, hypnotic tapes, and another program called The Smart Technique, which is supposed to reprogram your brain with positive thoughts and affirmations about weight and food. I’m still fat.
- I went for body wraps that cost me $35 a shot (that was also nearly 20 years ago) and lasted as long as you didn’t ingest any caffeine, sugar, or salt. You can guess how long that lasted!
- I have bought equipment off the TV and didn’t use it for long periods of time. I am starting to return to some of this stuff, but most pieces have been thrown out.
I’m sure there’s much, much more, but I can’t think of them at the moment. I’m no longer embarrassed to admit to my emotional shortcomings; I’m finally ready to make a solid commitment and do what it takes to get healthy and stay that way. You have to admit to all the things you’ve tried as a shortcut in order to face facts and say, “How much time have I wasted being fat and trying to get skinny quick? How much money did I waste by being sucked in by these emotional pitches? How much quality life did I give up being defeated by these strategies?” If you were at all like me, you’ve wasted huge amounts of cash and have absolutely nothing to show for it.
It’s time to put away the childish notions we can have a great killer body without the work. It just doesn’t happen that way. We know the most basic rule of physics: for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction . Put it into play: for every dumbbell you lift, the corresponding muscle gains strength and becomes lean. For every cardio training session you engage in, the fat distributed around your body will be released a little bit at a time and used as an energy source. It’s a fact you have to move it to lose it, and no amount of shortcuts will ever change the basic physics of this formula.
We don’t like having to go “backwards” to fundamentals, and truth be told, we’d outlaw them if possible. You see, “fundamentals” conjures absolutely no sexy images to our minds. When it comes to moving, grunting, and sweating, all kinds of lurid, erotic images flood our brains, and exercise is nowhere to be found in the mental slide show. The ugly truth is, the only way we’ll end up with those sexy images in reality is to go back to the basics of food and the “E” word…exercise.
It’s entirely possible to correct some body flaws with diet alone, but that’s only half the equation. Every single time they run the Hydroxycut TV ads and I see the perfectly chiseled body on the model, I know the product didn’t give her that body – the weight training, the ab sculpting, and the sweating did. No product in the world can burn the fat off or give you an all over toned appearance. Those results only come from sweating, gasping, grunting, and aching – there’s no other way around it.
So I gave up on the idea I could get something for nothing in terms of fitness. The only way in the world I can fix my flabby thighs, my drooping booty, and a belly that sags like a dachshund was to invest in the sweat equity program. But which program ? I had advice from many different exercise videos and books and diet plans – my challenge was to look at my body and decide what needed to be worked on.
Most women when asked what they’d change about their bodies would be quick to shout “EVERYTHING!” but you need to be realistic. Do the dreaded “naked in front of a mirror” test and evaluate yourself honestly. Then bring out your digital camera and take two pictures in your bra and panties – a front and a side view. Print them out, and then look at your body from the camera’s point of view. If you are like me, you have the comfy image of you’re a size 2 with a great body that you need to get out of your head. You might notice a certain aspect may be only inflated in your brain (“my butt is huge!”), but the picture you just printed doesn’t show a whopping big behind. Do a “State of the Union ” on your body – just don’t promise like a politician!
Once I did that, I stepped back and instead of negatively dwelling on the shape I wasn’t in, I went straight into the box in my house with the various diet books, plans, exercise videos, and dragged out the equipment.
Taping the underwear shots up on the wall, I pulled out the Michael Thurmund’s 6 Week Body Makeover kit and discarded the diet, but pulled out the exercise section. I had done the profile at least five years ago and it told me, “if you want to lose this, tone that, shape and sculpt, then you need to do these exercises”. I pulled those exercises out and initiated a new look at them since I didn’t want to keep repeating the same workouts.
By this time I had started the Slim in 6 program and was doing everything in the video, but didn’t always feel good or safe doing certain exercises. For instance, there was no resistance in a lot of the upper body movements. I don’t like moving, jumping, sweating only to get no visible results – that’s dumb! So all upper body exercises that didn’t have resistance, I skipped and saved them for after the workout. I pulled out the resistance band that has a removable loop with a ball on the end from the 6 Week Body Makeover kit and the exercise instruction manual, and performed the separately.
What’s the loop and ball for? Wrap the loop around the center of the resistance band and pull it snug; it acts like an anchor and you can use it over the top, around the door handle, or at the bottom of a door to perform a variety of exercises . You don’t need expensive gym equipment, and resistance bands come in multiple weight strengths. If you’re a man and want bulk, invest in a heavier band, but if you’re a woman, stay on the light side for lean muscle tone.
Squats and lunges – forget it, my knees cannot tolerate those two exercises so I excluded them from the Slim in 6 workout. I had a choice as to how I could perform them because I had the Bean workout as well as a Body by Jake Bun and Thigh machine. In terms of the Bean, their prepackaged workout has got to be the laziest out there with one set of reps and no muscle burn to tell your body it’s being done correctly. I discounted the Bean and instead used the Body by Jake equipment with 25 pounds of resistance.
When it comes to the Bean, skip their workout as it’s the shortest thing out there and won’t benefit you at all. I use the Bean with the Slim in 6 when you must get down on your hands and knees and perform a series of bun, thigh and hamstring moves that do burn. My knees are sensitive and can’t take that much pressure on them, so I slide the Bean underneath and work out that way. I know there will come a time when my knees will no longer bother me, and at that point I will put aside the Bean completely. Did I buy this? Yes and no – I did purchase it, but the cash came from a Christmas gift card from my parents.
Abdominal muscles are the worst to exercise because they hurt the most, plus it’s hard if you’re carrying all your weight in the belly region like I am. It’s hard to suck in your gut all the way to the floor when you’re so fat you could be mistaken as pregnant. I will give the Slim in 6 the thumbs up on the abdominal workouts because they do burn! When I started a few weeks ago, I couldn’t lift my head off the floor to do a crunch, but know I am getting strong enough to be able to lift my shoulders off the floor for most of the workout without straining my neck.
I’ll also give the Slim in 6 a thumbs up for its resistance band workout, but I suspect there are other programs out there that would probably do a much better, in-depth job of this. The reason I give this section of the video the thumbs up is because it’s at the beginner level.
When you look for videos, don’t buy ahead of your ability and think you’ll grow into it. The reality is if you keep up with it, you will, but you’re more apt to become disappointed, frustrated, and give up before you get there because the video is too hard to follow. You can always resell the beginner stuff on Ebay. Start small and be realistic!
If you’ve been following this series, you know I sold my car and have been walking everywhere since early November. One little cheap investment to help me gage my walk was a $6 pedometer. It may not be the most accurate thing as it is a spring loaded pendulum and registers steps I didn’t take because it senses movement, but it helps me to estimate my daily steps and rough distances. Before this, I had to wait my friend Laurie came down and then I’d get her to drive the route for exact distances.
On any given day, I’m working out on an old piece of equipment that can perform 3 different kinds of cardiovascular exercises. One I can’t do is an elliptical because it has always hurt my knees, but the other two are a ski machine movement and a stair stepping movement. I bought this on TV about ten years ago and used it faithfully when I first got it, but then the lazy monster moved in and I stopped. Now I’m using it a half hour every day in an attempt to build up my cardio endurance. You need cardio work between 30-45 minutes, several days a week if you want to burn fat and reveal the muscles you’re building underneath.
So as you can see, I’ve got a mish-mosh of routines I perform on nearly a daily basis. I could do only cardiovascular routines, but then I wouldn’t have any muscle definition in my upper body to balance out with the strength built in the legs. I could legitimately justify not doing the “all fours” routine where I lay on the Bean for support because I’m getting similar exercise benefits with the ski/stair stepping movements. I could cut back, but if I’ve got the endurance and desire to do a second workout on these areas and I’m cautious enough to avoid injury, I see no problem.
There are benefits to mixing up your routines, too – your body adapts fast to exercise and throws you into a plateau. You’ll eventually have to increase the intensity, or move into new kinds of exercise your body hasn’t been exposed to in the past. For instance, if you’ve been running and you’ve hit a plateau, you may have to give up running temporarily and switch to playing basketball to push you past the plateau.
No matter how you slice it, you can customize your own workout to fit your needs. I could legitimately slack off on all lower body exercises since my leg muscles are well developed, and if I push too hard, I will bulk up instead to creating a long, lean muscular look. You’ll have to decide with your own problem areas what kind of exercises to do; you don’t need to do every kind of exercise out there and exhaust yourself.
Keep in mind one important exercise fact:
- More repetitions/sets, less weight = long, lean look
- More weight = bulky build up
I wrote this article to show you how you can use what you’ve got lying around your house to how to make it work for you. Remember, no one else has your body, and no one diet or exercise plan fits every body type out there. Don’t be afraid to customize!
If you don’t like trying to find all the segments of this series, you can locate the links to them here and they will return you the exact spot on the socyberty.com site.
quazen.com articles by this writer can be found here
socyberty.com articles can be located here
relijournal.com articles are here
picable.com photographic images are here
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