Forgive me Internet, for I have sinned. It has been three days since my last work out.

For the last two weeks, I have been easily distracted. I haven’t gotten up to work out every morning. I have slept in, hit the snooze, made excuses and I have forsaken working out for television watching. I am truly ashamed.

My original goal was to get up to a daily work out routine of 60 minutes. I know that 60 minutes is a lot of time to spend in a given day doing exercise, but that’s what the government’s health experts recommend to prevent the gradual weight gain that comes with age, and so that’s what I was shooting for. Starting out, I could run/walk for about fifteen seconds before I was looking for a hot tub and a lime spritzer. I have worked up to currently being able to run about 1.5 miles of a 2 mile loop. I had improved my time from 10 minutes of running to 20 minutes of running! (At least I had last week, before all the Chick-Fil-A and Gossip Girl.) That’s PROGRESS! And when I first started my calisthenics routine, I really felt like I was going to vomit. That first day, when I got done with my fourth round of husband-prescribed ab-toners, I laid in my bed thinking, “This is never going to be easy. This is going to suck forever.” A month later, I had cut the amount of time that it took to do that work out routine in half, and I started adding to it. That’s ALSO progress. I had almost worked up to my 60 minutes-a-day goal, and I was so damn excited about it.

But then I looked in the mirror, and I didn’t see progress. Something about getting up every day to work out (even when you can tell that you’re getting healthier/stronger) is really difficult if you can’t also see that your stomach is getting flatter, or your spare tire is deflating. It shouldn’t all be about my abs, though. It’s about reducing the risk of Heart Disease, and about not getting Diabetes, and it’s about being able to get outside and play without feeling exhausted after three minutes. And even though I know that the only way to get stronger/healthier/toner is to WORK AT IT, knowledge doesn’t make it easier. I don’t know what is ever going to make this easier.

I know that at some point, getting up to work out every single day will become a habit. I hear, (though I have a hard time believing) that at some point I will really enjoy running. But in addition to not seeing any physical progress, working out is really hard for me because it’s not for a season. I’m aiming for healthy life changes. That means that FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE, I will not be able to drink and many Cokes as I want. And FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE, I’m going to be working/pushing my body on a daily basis. And FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE, I’m going to feel a measure of guilt when I suck down a whole serving of Chick-Fil-A nuggets and fries. When I think about those kinds of changes, they feel so overwhelming–like maybe I could do them for a week or for a month, but FOREVER???

I guess I’m going to have to scale “forever” down a bit to something like, “a week.” Maybe once I have “a week” and I get four “a week”‘s in a row, then it will turn into forever before I realize what’s happening. We’ll see. This is all really big talk for a girl who just hoovered an entire package of Now-and-Laters.