Cardi-O, She Isn't Fooling Around

Six years ago, before my husband knocked me up like a teenage girl on prom night, I embarked on a personal journey to get myself in better shape. I lost almost 20 pounds, I was doing Zumba to tone what everyone was telling me were muscles, and I was probably, (Wait, I am vividly remembering how I felt about high school gym class.) no definitely, in the best shape of my entire life.

But pregnancy has zero regard for six months of hard work and undid all my progress in one single trimester. It made me crave fast food that I otherwise didn't care for, it cut through those barely toned muscles like butter, and left me shredded (and not in the good "six pack ab" kind of way) into a shell of something that once resembled "in shape".

But hey, I can roll with the punches, so I did the best I could to maintain a decent weight while being a sleep deprived new mom comforting herself with her hobby of baking. (Yeah, the irony isn't lost on me either.) While I mostly got some sort of daily exercise, I know there were long-ish periods where I wasn't. (Some of them might have been the months I convinced myself that breastfeeding, while burning a gajillion calories a day, was like a boob inferno of calorie burning epicness that meant I could shed baby weight with a mere flexing of my mammary muscle. Spoiler alert: It wasn't. Second spoiler alert: I don't think mammary muscles are a real thing.)

Fast forward six years to the present day. Since I have always marched to the beat of my own drummer, I decided February 25 was a better time for New Year's Resolutions than January 1. I mean, you gotta get to know the new year before you can commit to any sort of new relationship with it, right? I found out that we were super incompatible because I was somehow managing to gain even more weight, despite my best efforts to exercise and eat well. This meant that I had to start a new and personal relationship with a detested, loathsome, repulsive foe: Cardio.

If there's ever been one word meant to strike fear into the hearts of chunky, out of shape moobs everywhere, that would be it. Cardio is a relentless bitch who brings you just to the brink of heart attack before allowing you to do a stretch and cool down.

Oh, and she LOVES burpees, which are probably an exercise thought up by Satan himself.

Now, there's a certain age where workouts become, well, even more of a workout. When you have more work arounds than workouts, you might be getting a little too old to dance with Queen Bitch Cardio. When you can't do burpees because they hurt your wrist (carpal tunnel), when you can't go all the way down on left knee lunges because it's never been the same since you wrenched it 8 years ago, when you can't do the cobra stretching position because of your acid reflux....well, let's just say that you can probably retire your "Spring Chicken" plaque.

And if all those old lady issues weren't enough to get me down, my metabolism being in the crapper definitely is. Apparently six years older in human years is like 112 in metabolism years and it's so weak and can barely get up a good burn so that even chewing celery (a negative calorie food!) makes me gain half a pound. (Yet all the blood tests say he's fine... cagey old man.)

So if you have been struggling with adopting a new exercise routine, or trying to eat healthier (which would be so much freaking easier if things like chocolate cake and cheeseburgers didn't exist), just know that you're not alone. We can all form a support group where we drink gourmet coffee drinks (probably made with some soy shit to make it half the calories) and trash talk evil Cardio behind her back.




Need more mayhem? Find me on FaceBook (Modern Mom Mayhem) or on the Instagram (modernmommayhem).