An Exercise in New Year's Resolve

New Year's resolutions. Made with such belief, promise and most importantly, conviction. One resolution that is recycled every year is the ‘I will get healthy this year’ or ‘I will lose weight’ or ‘I will start exercising more’.

I will exercise more... (Summertime Jogging by Candida.Performa on Flickr).

If you’re anything like me, said determination (bordering on mild obsession) lasts for three or four weeks before things start to go pear shaped and you’re starting to slip off the bandwagon.

It starts with a birthday cake that shows up at work. What? No. You couldn’t possibly refuse. That would be outright rude, and you don’t want to offend the birthday girl.

Then there are dinners with friends. You haven’t seen them since last year (see what I did there) and you have loads to catch up on. You don’t want to be bathed in your own sweat by the time you see them and hair that has dried with the sweet smell of stale perspiration will draw attention for all the wrong reasons. Skip the gym, just this once, go on.

This year I made this very resolution. I will exercise more; I will eat healthier, I will go to that spin class even though it feels like hell on Earth… yada yada yada.

Considering it’s still early days I’m not at the stage where the excuses have started to flow…yet.

I’m sure my undertaking would be easier if I was someone who loved exercise. You all know who and what I mean. You meet these people at work, see them on TV and run into them on the street. You can see it in their faces. They’re in pain and they love it, they really, fucking love it.

She loves it, LOVES it...(Miami Fitness by Calibe Thompson on Flickr).

And deep down (actually you don’t even have to venture that deep) I secretly want that. I want to love exercise. I want to find joy in the burning in my thighs. I want to relish the stinging sensation that sweat brings on when it drips into my eyes. I want to…you get the idea right?

Sadly this is not the case. Take tonight’s gym class for instance (or even any gym class I’ve been to in the last three weeks, which is about three). Instead of walking away feeling larger than life, all I can feel is the wave of nausea rising from within my belly with my lungs feeling as though they’ll burst with the next breath I take.

I barely manage to make it to the ladies change room before I’m sure I’ll pass out or throw up, or both. It’s a good 15 minutes of sitting there with my head between my legs before I’m brave enough to start making my way home. 

Every night it’s the same. As I wander home in my exhausted stupor I hope that people won’t notice my weakened state and desperate fatigue, instead looking at my butt hugging tracksuit and fluorescent sneakers and thinking 'she could probably out run me'.

And there it is, the lesson in all of this: even if I don't end up fit, at least I can look it.

-Susie Obeid