Getting to the gym consistently is one of the biggest hurdles that I have stuck to jumping over while I’m trying to lose a bit more than a few. I seem to have no consistent schedule, except that I do end up doing it every day that I can. One downside of this is that I tend to work out late at night, almost always an hour or less before I go to bed. I’ve heard that this is not the best for the sleep, but I suspect it is actually better than nothing, so I continue to get to the gym at 11pm or 12pm. Unfortunately, I found myself with some extra roadblocks this week: the exercise room was half broken. The breakers on one half of the room tend to trip when the air conditioner and two machines that are on that circuit are all in use. This means that no one can use those machines until someone from the coop management goes and resets the switch. The treadmill machine, my weapon of choice for shedding a few pounds, is inconveniently on this circuit, and can’t be plugged in anywhere else. This happened 3 times this week, Wed-Fri. I’m calling the office for the second time tomorrow.

It is significantly harder to exercise when I don’t have the treadmill handy — the stepping machine works on semi-powered days, but it tires me out much too quickly and I cannot get enough exercise in. I’m not the kind of person to reliably run in place or do jumping jacks. My solution was to move the exercise bike to the powered side of the room. The biggest problem with semi-powered days is motivation. Usually I have the motivation to get to the exercise room and start the machine, and once I’ve started I can stop. Opening the door to a bunch of non-working machines is a huge motivation hit though. It’s so much easier to take a roadblock like this and skip a day — in fact I did this week once. Luckily I discovered that the bike is on wheels on one side so it is easy to move to the other side of the room. However, I’d like to solicit suggestions for alternate exercises for semi-power days. The things that work in the room are a weight machine with a bunch of attachments, the stepping machine, and the exercise bike. I can’t really go outside and exercise, because of the late hour and neighborhood that I live in, so it needs to be an inside task. The last requirement is that it focuses on losing weight, not gaining muscle. I’m fairly sure that I’ll be gaining some muscle along this process, but the goal is to drop the weight.

I have taken Saturdays to be my day off, so that I can get a little rest and not be so stressed about things, but I’m not taking it this week as I need to “make up” for the skipped day.

This week (Nov 3 - Nov 9): Minimum: 338.0 (-0.5) (Nov 7) Maximum: 340.0 (-1.0) (Nov 4) Average: 339.25 (-0.35) (139.25 to goal) Exercise Calories: 2314 on 5 days Average Calories per session: 462.8