There Is A Point When The Zipper Will Not Zip Up Anymore

     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 could wear what I wanted to wear while stuffing myself with chips, chocolate bars, and soda as a staple food item.

I basically worked all day and partied 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 eventually moved from a very physically demanding job to a less physical ?sitting behind a desk ?job that I still enjoyed my junk food at.

The months went by and before I knew what was happening I couldn抰 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抰 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 expired I put working out on the back-burner and grabbed my chocolate bar.

Quickly, I went past the not being able to button up the pants era and entered the - I can抰 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 honestly 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 ended my gym routine again.

Very quickly I was in the ?I抦 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抰 excited about it because I knew that while I may lose the weight I will eventually get bored with the gym, stop going, gain even more weight back and continue this process forever!

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 lose now. 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抯 quite easy to get lost in TV land and just kind of robotically go up and down on an elliptical with not much effort.

Well let抯 just say I eventually was forty pounds heavier than the days of dancing and eating anything I wanted. True, I probably could 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 simple for me.

After talking about it with my husband I remembered 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 was boring to me in the gym and I could only get through the recommended ten minutes of warm-up most times. I would then push myself on the weights and completely exhaust myself with them. And that抯 when it clicked.

I hadn't been doing weights because we have free weights and I didn抰 know how to utilize them correctly. I had seen the ads for the resistance band, and the exercise ball, and even the use your own body weight for toning up but I was tricked into thinking that the gym was the only way I could have a good weight workout. I also assumed that cardio was the key point in losing weight. Somewhere along the line I had been told this about cardio and embedded it into my thought process.

Now I know it抯 not true. Not only is cardio not the only part to losing weight but building muscle is essential to losing weight and being healthy.

And you don抰 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.

Today I actually have a productive workout at home routine and I don抰 have to head to the gym anymore.

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