"So, Nicole ... what kind of exercise stuff do you have in the house?"
Our treadmill. It's been a member of the family for a while. My husband and I originally bought this as a joint Christmas gift for ourselves in early 2001. We used it avidly for about three months. It then became the world's most expensive clothes-drying rack, and the absolute bane of our moving company when we bought our house. Once in a blue moon one of us would make an effort to start using it again, but it remained mostly turned off and unloved until January 2005. It seems to be handling the sudden upswing in usage after all the neglect admirably well (knock on wood). I don't know what I'd do if we didn't have it. I don't think I could tolerate outdoor walking for long with the summer we've had, and let's not even talk about jogging in this weather.
Free weights. We have a jumble of adjustable plate dumbbells (useful in an annoying "Two people at differing fitness levels keep using them and not clearing the plates off the bar so then the other person has to do it which sucks for the person who can't lift umpteen zillion pounds, mutter mutter" sort of fashion), dumbbells in specific weights, and an EZ-curl barbell. I also have an 8-pound medicine ball and an exercise band that I use for rows.
The physioball. This is turning out to be an amazingly useful and versatile little beast. At first I just did pushups off of it, with the ball parked under my thighs. Now I use it for ab crunches (OW) and as a sort of bench while I'm doing chest presses.
The Xbox. It helped me put on lots of pounds when I'd park my fat butt in front of it and play "Halo" for hours on end. Now, I've harnessed its power and I use it for good rather than evil: thanks to its ability to play DVDs while I'm treading away, it's helped me to take some of those pounds off again. I have been buying up DVDs of the classic "Doctor Who" series from Amazon; they're a perfect treadmill distraction. Oh, and it also plays our yoga and Pilates DVDs. So I'd say the Xbox has a well-earned place in my fitness regimen.
In other news ... looks around conspiratorially to make sure the scale can't hear ... I do believe I finally broke that plateau. My weight for the last couple of days has finally been lower. The scale is still being horribly annoying about tacking on a .5, so I can't say in full honesty that I've lost 60 pounds and am within 10 pounds of goal #1. How I hate that .5 jazz, particularly when the scale bounces back and forth for a few seconds before coughing it up.
But hey -- as long as everything is trending downward, I'll take it.
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