How Maximum Fitness is helping save my life
(Insert cheesy infomercial music here.)
This week, I hit my first major goal. 30lbs lost, the amount I gained during the twins pregnancy. I lost the final 3lbs over Thanksgiving week, and that was thanks not to the stomach virus that my children spread through my family, but due to good old fashioned work. I smiled so big when I saw that number on the scale. I knew my hard work had been paying off. I could tell it in my clothes, feel it in my body, but damn it feels good to see it in the numbers!
When you're in a zone, you're in a zone and I'm there. Finally. This has not been an easy process, but everyone knows nothing worth the trouble is ever obtained easily. I'm finding my stride again after so long on the injured reserve list. I always knew I'd be back. I plotted and dreamed and prayed for this day so many times. The vision of what I would be one day kept me going through 2 back to back pregnancies one of which included 3 months of bed rest. Do you know what its like to be confined to a bed for months at a time with only your mind as company? It can be a lonely, lonely place. Not to mention the physical toll on my body.
Imagine all you've done over the past three months. How many times you went to work, the store, a friend's house, walked to your car, ran errands. Then imagine me, during all that time, JUST LAYING THERE. Thinking. Wondering. Wishing. Dreaming. Plotting. Planning.
After Bryce was born, I had just joined a Biggest Loser program at the gym complete with Saturday morning Boot Camp to lose the 50lbs I gained with him. Then BAM! You're pregnant again, oh and its twins. Surprisingly I spent less time on actual bed rest this time around, but lets just say the muscles in my body didn't see much action for another nine months.
So by the time they were 3 months old and I got the all clear to exercise, I was beyond ready. I'll never forget my first day of Bootcamp at MaxFit. I walked in with with a crew of size nothings who were there to work on their 'gut' and I felt lower than I had in years. I wasn't that sexy, confidant person I was two short years before twirling around in tight dresses and heels. I felt sentenced to a life in pajamas covered in spit up and raggedy maternity clothes. I had sworn to myself I would never be back in that kind of condition and there I was. The excuse I just gave birth to twins was just that to me, an excuse.
I lingered to the back of the group, if there had been a corner I could go hide in I would have. They chatted with the instructor, all blond hair and muscle bound tanned skin. I wanted to be ignored. I wanted to be invisible, do my workout and go unnoticed. I was embarrassed and ashamed at who I was at that moment, an overweight mother of three trying to get some dignity and health back.
He took off his bootcamp shades and made me meet his eyes for an introduction. He held out his hand and made me shake it and refused to let me slip into the abyss of self loathing. I'm sure he was just doing what he does with every client, but that simple handshake, split second of eye contact, changed my life.
By the time the second class was over, I was feeling more confident. I noticed their sign by the road boasted someone lost 6lbs in one week at bootcamp. I felt ballsy that day and asserted myself to ask if I lost more than 6lbs in a week if my name could be on the sign. I lost 8 and there was my declaration a week later for all to see. I started getting phone calls from my friends who saw my name. I started smiling more. I started to believe again.
I fell hard for my new routine, just an hour of me time, meditating with my eyes closed, sweat drenched days in the sun saving me from my mind's take on reality. Every once in a while when I needed a little mental boost to get me through a physical task out of my league, I would let the thoughts creep in about another upcoming MRI for my baby boy's bone infection in his spine. Something that usually made me shiver suddenly made me GO. Fight. Push harder.
In the heat of an exercise if I thought about how hard what I was doing was, that I couldn't do it, I thought of my Uncle Gary, dying in his bed at home. I hated cancer and infections and kidney abnormalities and bed rest. I kicked, punched, flailed around beating the crap out of what hurt, stomped what I was scared of right into the ground.
It almost sent me backwards into a mini-depression when I got injured. I was on such a roll, damn that King's Island trip. (See my August 9th entry... EMBARRASSING!) But I fought my way back, took a month to heal and went way easy on myself when I came back to Noon Bootcamp with a new instuctor who motivated me differently. I am in another new era of my success story and it may be corny and belong in an infomercial promoting the best 'anti-gym' around, but thank you Maximum Fitness for helping me fight to get my life back better than it ever was before, helping me change, grow, be happy.
I am serious when I say they are saving my life, an outstretched hand pulling me from my pain. Thank you will never be enough.
