I am on a fitness plan. It’s been two weeks. I did not undertake this on my own, you should know. This is my friend Spanish Girl’s fault. Her gym ran a promotional where members bring in a friend and you compete for 21 days as a team against other member/guest pairs. Whoever loses the highest % body weight wins a small tablet named after eyeballs & fruit. (Spanish Girl‘s husband saw my prior post about fat jeans & chickens and suggested I might be up for this sort of project.)

Now I live a life filled with tension.

On the one hand, I am veeeeeery competitive. I want to win that prize.

On the other, I MISS my sedentary lifestyle. I miss wine and carbs and being able to declare “pasta night!” when I forget to thaw a protein. I miss walking THIS DOG an extra block or two and thinking of myself as deeply devoted to health & fitness.

This was exacerbated the other day when I overheard our trainer talking about how her legs hurt after her workout. That’s when it hit me: This isn’t just for three weeks…this is forever. I’m supposed to do this exercise/eat good food thing for the REST OF MY LIFE.

You’d think I’d have enough perspective on this to appreciate that at 45, I’m at least halfway through this onerous task, whereas that poor trainer girl is in her early 20s and has no real end in sight.

You’d be wrong about that perspective thing. I had none.

Instead, I had a bit of an interior tantrum in response to this late-breaking realization.  Yesterday was a blah day of grumpiness brought on by gray weather and reading yucky things online, so I decided that I was TIRED of being healthy and I was going to binge on delicious junk food. I envisioned bags full of Snickers bars, and me chomping them down one after another with unfettered glee. I was ready to rebel, I tell you.

I was so caught up in this fantasy that I went to our cupboard looking for a bag of Snickers. Not only do we not have Snickers bars, we don’t have a single item of chocolate anywhere in our house. We have NOTHING binge worthy, it turns out. It was pitiful.

I enacted my rebellion by stirring some Pollaner All-Fruit into nonfat Greek Yogurt.

Sigh.

In our high school yearbook, one of the most popular quotes we wise students listed under our pictures to define ourselves was this: “We never failed to fail–it was the easiest thing to do.” It’s from this song by Crosby, Stills & Nash (which you should watch and learn and internalize, because it is just so musically and lyrically incredible).  I thought of this yesterday, and it made me laugh. I failed to fail!  Turns out it’s not as easy as it looks :)

I guess I’ll soldier on. I’ve got eyeball fruit to win.