D_wn Is Whomping My Hiney

I realize there's a tendency for exagerating in the blogosphere but this is not one of those times. She's trying to kill me. I'm not kidding. The woman is brutal and relentless. All 103 pounds of lean muscle mass cuteness. Cute to the point where I want to slap her but instead I cower in her svelte shadow because she has the power to add ten crunches or five squats on a whim. And so she says "Jump!" and I say "With or without a net?"

The truth is I'm loving the gym and working with a personal trainer. On the days when I can shift my work schedule around I'm getting to the gym for an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon. Me. The gym. Twice a day. I'm motivated and sweating like a wild woman. Not a casual sweat, not the genteel glow on a dainty lady's pallid flesh, not a summer's heat perspiration. I'm talking about bare arms glistening, tributaries of salty sweat flowing freely across the facial terrain from forehead to eyes, and rain forest humidity under the hair dangling over the nape of your neck. What really pushes my sweat button is a solid hour on this bad boy, the Nautilus Tread Climber. For the uninformed by appearance the Tread Climber looks like a treadmill that's split down the middle so while one side is going up the other side is going down. Think of it as the love child of an evening interlude between a treadmill and an elliptical machine. It burns abought 17 calories per minute which is a nice click up from my usual burn rate on 100 calories per mile walking. The downside is that I can't get an arm swing going because my klutz factor has me holding onto the handlebars for my sweet life, with my full attention on my foot fall. Perhaps one day I'll get comfortable enough to release my death grip but in the meantime, my profuse amount of sweat can be attributed to equal parts cardio work out and ice-cold fear sweat.

My personal trainer also turned me onto a great online resource, CalorieKing.com. For the past four days I've logged every minute of exercise and every ounce of food. I've used other online food and exercise journals in the past but this one is by far the best and is just another extra little motivator and keeping the motivation up keeps Phatgirl moving in the right direction.