Gym progress

It’s strange how much I’ve come to enjoy going to the gym. I never would have expected to be such a convert, but here I am, eight months down the line, still dragging my arse out to the leisure centre first thing in the morning, still using the pushy uppy machine, the squeezey thighy machine, the walkie walkie machine. We get to the gym probably three or four times a week, and it’s finally starting to pay off.

Not that I’ve lost any weight – oh no. I’m still the heaviest I’ve ever been, but at least that weight is more concentrated in muscles and less spread out in flab. I can tell, for example, that I’ve been focusing on my legs because they look a lot less like tree trunks now than they did. Indeed, my thighs no longer scare me every time I look at them (which, if I’m honest, I try not to). My legs still complain like hell when I walk up the stairs at Holloway Road tube station, but they cope better walking up the hill to Highgate.

My metabolism appears to be adjusting too. I’ll confess that I haven’t managed to give up Coke at all, but that seems to be mattering less – my body seems to be processing calories faster. At least, I think that’s what it’s doing, and whilst obvious evidence is thin on the ground, I can attest that I’m not getting wider even though I’ve entirely failed to beat my addiction to lovely yummy tooth-rot-in-a-can.

Overall, I’m quite happy to keep going as often as we can. I frequently grumble about it, of course, because in the back of my head I’m still expecting to hate it, but I’d hate it more if I couldn’t go (although not as much as Kevin). That surprises me, because I’ve never been sporty or outdoorsy, preferring to enjoy the countryside at a sedate pace, usually from the vantage point of a beer garden and with a glass of something alcoholic in my hand. (For some reason, I become deeply attracted to cider when in beer gardens, although not the brands of cider that come out bright orange and are served with ice, as seem to be the rage right now. No drink should be that shade of orange except for Lucozade, and that’s a drink for when you’re ill.)

I suspect the best way to come to terms with this is to just not think about it too deeply. Or, indeed, at all.

Of course, we’re now getting into tricky territory. The dress is under construction, and I neither want to put on weight – or rather, circumference – nor lose any, as the dress is designed and fitted to me as I am now. I don’t think I’m at risk of gaining girth, so long as I keep going to the gym, and if I unexpectedly lose lots of inches I’m sure I can flab up again pretty quickly just by spending a lot more time and money eating chocolate and drinking vodka.

There’s a bit of leeway in the corset, though, because I can adjust that to fit simply by pulling harder on the ribbons that do it up. Well, not me – it’d be pretty tricky to do up your own corset, unless you had some sort of complex winch and pulley system, and even then I think you’d need help. But if I lose an inch here or there it won’t be a disaster, as Kate will just have to reposition her foot in the small of my back and yank harder.

Still, it’s nice to feel that I may, one day, approach a condition that could be considered “fit”. Best not to rush it though.