Honesty...

As established in the last blog post, I am not a person who excels at patience. And today that was painfully obvious to me. Today was my second time at Pilates. Justin, my personal trainer (yes, it feels incredibly weird to make reference to anyone as my personal trainer) told me that I had to keep going to Pilates, because a strong core is the foundation to any healthy individual. So I go today and this is the first day where I have felt like a complete failure.

Yes, it felt awesome to join and make little steps towards my goals, but in class today it feels like I have gone backwards. Poses are hard or impossible for me to do. I have no idea how to modify them so that I'm still working muscles even though I may not be going to the same extremes as everyone else. Do I expect extra-special treatment because I'm the only fat person in the class? No. But I do expect the instructor to take an extra three seconds to explain how to lower the intensity. I can't be the only person who needs that.

This class is full of new motions and I find myself struggling to keep up and on the verge of tears when I realize that some of the poses aren't possible for me to do at this stage (grown men can cry, this is the 21st century). It's not as simple as, 'I'm not strong enough to do more than 3 of these'. It's 'I physically cannot swing my legs over my head and raise my pelvis off of the mat.'

I guess I expect to be able to do more after almost a month of consistent physical activity. And maybe it's that I'm still sore from my personal training session or that the instructor was different and had never had a fat person in her class before. Who knows, but I definitely leave the gym in a sour mood.

I know this post is slightly more on the downer side of the spectrum, but I don't think it would be truly reflective of my experiences if I didn't occasionally tell everyone who reads (whoever you may be) that sometimes this sucks. Don't worry, this isn't going to derail me. I'm still going to get off my butt and schlep it on down to the gym on Monday (I'm choosing to take Sunday off in order to spend some time with my visiting parents) but hopefully this does let you know that despite feeling crappy, I know that ultimately this is the best thing I could be doing for myself and one day of a foul mood isn't going to make me quit.

I will never go backwards.

So because this post was more on the serious side of things, here's a joke:

What's black and white, black and white, black and white?

A penguin rolling down a hill.

If you don't like it, I don't care.