Saturday, September 10, 2011

Confession Time: Fell Off The Wagon Already...

I TOTALLY Want To Find This In A T-Shirt!
And by that I am referring to the fitness wagon.  Or, rather, treadmill.  I suppose that's a more accurate metaphor.  I'm not sure.  I'm not thinking too well at the moment.  Sigh....

I have a good excuse.  Don't we always have good excuses?  Rationales?  Reasons?  I have a doozy.  See, my Dad had himself a mild heart attack on Thursday and I've been spending most of the last several days at the hospital.  He's doing well now, thankfully. Doctors found a 99% blockage in one artery, an 80% blockage in another, and 50% blockage in a third, and decided to perform an angioplasty to insert a balloon tipped catheter into an artery in his groin.  They snaked the catheter up through the veins to his cardiac artery, used the balloon tip to widen the clogged artery and then inserted a stent (kind of a mesh frame that looks like the spring in a pen) to act as scaffolding to keep the vein open for blood flow.

Pretty cool stuff, huh?  Way more than I ever wanted to know about this kind of thing, really.  Anywhoooo,  with all the excitement, there wasn't a lot of time for serious exercise. I did manage to hop on the treadmill for a bit each day, but there was no time for riding, weights, or anything else.  I'm pretty sure trips to and from the last possible parking spot and up and down the cardiac wing's stairs don't count.

Not only did I NOT exercise like I wanted to, I ate darn near everything in sight.  Including most of my daughter's birthday cake.  At one point I made a family member hide it.  Really.  I'm a compulsive stress eater.  Thank God there were no Oreos in the house.  Add a couple glasses of wine (liguid de-stresser!) a night to the all the crap I was eating, and let's just say I'm gonna be climbing out of a big hole!

And believe me, even though this fitness thing started as a way to gain strength to ride better, after seeing what my Dad went through, and what others in the cardiac wing were going through, it's become much more.  Maybe I'm having a knee jerk reaction, but seeing how much a poor diet, lack of exercise, and excess weight has compromised my father's health, I'm a little scared of my own bad habits.  We have similar demons that way, Dad and I.

The good news is I did get some exercise in.  The "other" news (I'd rather not look at it as bad news) is that, like my Dad,  I need to get a more organized fitness plan in place, and coping mechanisms other than food for when things get rough.

Am not 100% sure what those will be, but I'll be thinking about it while I'm doing my 5 minutes of two point, up-up-down posting, and posting without stirrups tomorrow.

1 comment:

  1. Hopefully your Dad is well on the mend (scary stuff). As to the other? Well. I had Shingles again last week and ate 5 cupcakes. *urp* I blame my husband for this; had he been home from work earlier, he would have eaten some of the cupcakes (thereby saving me from my self-inflicted stupidity ;o)

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