"Excruciatus"

Day 1. To quote Harry Potter, an excruciatus curse was executed on me. The first day out is both easiest and most painful. It is easy because you don't yet hurt from your previous day's exercise and hardest because you are fighting mental and physical limitations. Everything jiggles in all the wrong places and you are self aware of this plight and wonder how badly you look. Of course, if you think about when you see others working out, you never laugh or think, "Look at that person. They look awful." You instead commend them for exercising and perhaps feel a twinge of "I should be doing that."

I am a chronic see-saw exerciser. Each time I get aboard with a routine and return to a vaguely familiar figure, I roll back into my no less than intimidating schedule and am hit with some tragic need that pulls me away from exercising for months at a time. As I get older, this gets harder on me. It no longer takes the two weeks to return to a pristine shape. Instead, it takes months.

What draws me to Natalie's inspiring blog is that this is a real life program with a good friend who is committed to the same goal and acknowledges all of our many daily struggles. I'm going to be a little gender biased also and say that somehow, I feel our lives are far more complicated and stressful as female professionals. We are expected to work harder than counterparts, deal with the aftermath of counterparts, and all while multitasking our brains out.

I was on the road to becoming healthful with rigorous scuba diving, when I became the sole caretaker of my grandma while maintaining my already daunting schedule. The past month has been stressful and consisted of little physical exertion. I'm trying to maintain presidency of our local chapter of AIGA, the professional association for design and trying to remain well employed. I have a dog with a mind of his own, who must accompany me on runs in all the many directions he pulls in. That creates serious consequences to my momentum.

And so with that, I join the 50 in 50 group weighing in at 154 lbs with an initial goal to lose 20 lbs.