Susan's Homeschool Blog

Just because you’re home all day with your kids doesn’t mean you can’t exercise. Yes, homeschool moms can exercise, and they don’t need to wait for their husbands to watch the kids.

I’m looking out the window at the snow falling, and I know that the streets are icy. If I were to run around the block, I would slip and fall and end up in an emergency room for a cracked bone or something. So how do you exercise when the sun isn’t shining and you have no gym membership? The best answer is to get some exercise videos.

Groan. Yeah, I hear you. Look, even if you are dirt poor and don’t have any money, go to Goodwill, to the video section. There are bazillions of exercise videos to choose from, and they are usually only 99 cents. So you have no excuse. Choose several, because you’ll notice that some are more irritating than others. Like the curly-headed guy from the 80’s, you know which one, that has you “Sweating to the Oldies.” I thought I would like it because I liked the music. But I was so irritated by him that I didn’t even get through the video once. His mannerisms were effeminate.

I was given a box of videos by a friend, and I thought I would try all the exercise videos to see which one I liked. I didn’t like any of them! The yoga didn’t even raise my heart rate, and the positions were impossible. (I’m not flexible whatsoever.) Boxing isn’t my style, either. Maybe I’m just not coordinated.

I forgot about an exercise video I had tucked away in a drawer. This was a video I had gotten at Goodwill years ago, when I had a new baby and wanted to lose the baby fat. The video came highly recommended by three women from my church. It’s “Cindy Crawford: Shape Your Body Workout.” (The copyright is 1992, so you should be able to find that one used.) I haven’t done this one in years, but I remember it being good enough to keep. Maybe I’ll do that one when I can’t handle Jillian’s, which is the one I’m doing now.

Yes, I broke down and actually bought a brand, spankin’ new exercise video. It cost $10 at Walmart. It’s called “No More Trouble Zones” by Jillian Michaels from “The Biggest Loser.” The DVD says, “Eliminate Love Handles, Muffin Tops, and Wobbly Arms for Good!” Okay.

I don’t know why I love this video. It’s impossibly hard. I can’t really do it. But I tell myself, “I’m going to just pretend I’m doing it. I’ll modify it.” If anybody were watching me, they would tell you I was a wimp and I wasn’t really doing it. But they would be wrong. My muscles were burning during the one-hour workout, and the next day my whole body was hurting. (The box says the workout is 40 minutes, but that’s false. I’m telling you straight up; expect it to be an hour.) I shoo my kids down the stairs. If you’re more mature than I am, you can have your kids exercising with you. It’s way too embarrassing for me, and I have to be alone or I can’t concentrate. (Besides, my older two sons are 10 and 9, and Jillian and the other two girls are dressed too skimpy. To me, it’s just a motivation, because I want to look that good, so I’m not offended by their skimpy clothes, as long as I’m the only one in the room.)

Doing the exercise video during the month of December (a total of three times) was a comedy show. I kept banging into the Christmas tree by accident. Once I knocked an ornament clean off the tree, and it went flying through the air, crashing against the fireplace. I’m not making this up. This workout was dangerous, I thought. Multiple times I collapsed to the floor while doing the floor exercises. I’ve never been able to do push-ups, not even from my knees. I’m a wimp, I tell you.

The two women who are standing behind Jillian have smiles plastered on their faces, like they are actually enjoying the exercise. I envisioned enormous people trying to do the same exercises behind those women. I saw them losing their balance, falling, or looking with incredulity, “You want me to do what?!” I smiled to myself as I envisioned this funny workout.

The workout includes 3-pound hand weights, which I got at… drum roll please… Goodwill. My hands were so sweaty that I almost threw the weight straight through the television set. I gripped them harder.

But for some reason I like Jillian, so her workouts are okay, as long as I can clock in the time. She says, “Don’t quit on me now. Think of all the reasons you’re doing this.” And at the end, she says, “This workout is no joke. Don’t undo all the work you’ve done here by not eating right. I make big promises, and I deliver on those promises if you put in the work.” I love her. I don’t care if her workout is impossible. Maybe next month I’ll be able to do more. But after a month with Jillian, my husband has noticed that my belly is flatter. He just up and told me so. I’ve purposely eaten less food. I drink a lot more water. And I don’t snack in the evenings as much. I’ve lost 6 pounds so far, and it’s not even the end of January. (Granted, part of that weight loss was due to sickness, but I’ll take it!)

When I was trying to lose ten pounds, I knew that as soon as the summer was over, our crazy schedule in the fall would prevent me from having time to exercise. This was back when my husband and I were leaders at Cub Scouts, involved in sports for each of our three sons, Bible study, guitar lessons, etc. My husband had deacon training meetings on top of it. Every weekday we had two activities back to back in the evenings, sometimes simultaneously where my husband and I had to take kids to separate places. It seemed impossible for me to fit in exercise.

I somehow had it in my mind that I couldn’t exercise unless I was at the gym. But this was not true. If you’re determined enough, you can fit it in whenever. You just have to plan to do it. For example, when I took one son to soccer practice (at the same time that my husband took another son to karate), I let my other two children play on the playground while I put on my running shoes and ran around the playground and soccer field during the entire hour. To not get bored and feel like I was wasting time, I listened to homeschool audios on my MP3.

When I was raking pine needles in the fall, I did it a lot faster so that it would be aerobic exercise. I did the same with vacuuming. Actually, these chores gave me a sense of satisfaction greater than staring at the sweaty body of the person in front of me at the gym. When winter came, I shoveled the driveway. You’d better believe I was toning my muscles. I was so sore the first day after shoveling, indicating that I had used muscles I hadn’t used for a while. (I had to be really careful not to throw out my back. My husband has never allowed me to shovel the driveway until this year.)

I’m sure you’ll all be disappointed to find out I gained back the ten pounds over the winter last year. I dropped the ball. I had reached my goal. I was my ideal weight. So now I could just live normally, right? Not! By the next summer (last summer), I had the ten pounds to lose again. But this time I didn’t feel like doing it. It just didn’t seem like it was worth all that tremendous amount of work.

Don’t get me wrong. I did lots of outdoor activities with my children, including practicing sports skills. But because I wasn’t working out for real (at a gym or otherwise), I lost no weight at all. Then I turned 40. I gained seven more pounds. Yikes! I found this out on the day after Thanksgiving. Here I was about to enter the Christmas season, and I was overweight by 17 pounds. My husband had canceled our gym membership to save money. Plus, my husband and I were going through a lot of stress from being spiritually attacked for four months, and I cried a lot. But I didn’t pig out. Really. I almost never ate junk food. I wasn’t being bad. I just didn’t exercise.

I set myself the goal of not gaining more weight in December. My husband laughed at my goal. I’ve never had such a small goal. I looked at my husband, and I told him I would lose the weight starting in January.

I kept my word. I gained no weight in December. I bought an exercise video and did it a few times. I told my mom to not put food on my plate at Christmas, that I wanted to think carefully before putting food on my plate. She looked confused because she thinks I’m still skinny. I passed up the gorgeous cookies.

Now that it’s January, it’s time to shed the pounds. I’ve told my husband I’m running the 12K run this year in May, and that I’m going to try a Zumba class. Just you wait and see. You’d better believe I’ll drop the pounds.

As soon as I came back from my romantic weekend getaway, I wanted to make a note to myself of why exercising was important. After all, my dislike for exercise usually outweighs the technical benefits. As long as I’m still skinny, who cares about exercise? I knew this would be my attitude. So as a reminder to myself, I wrote a list of all the benefits of exercise for me:

1. My heart doesn’t feel squished any more when I run up the stairs.
2. I can climb hills with my husband without feeling winded.
3. I will feel healthier in my old age instead of being in constant pain.
4. I will have more energy as a result of exercising.
5. Stress relief.
6. Toned, better-looking body.
7. More strength.
8. Better sleep because my heart rate will be slower during sleep.
9. More fit to do activities with my children, such as hiking and camping. More endurance to do such things.
10. I won’t get fat.
11. I won’t get injured as easily if my muscles are stronger.
12. My back won’t go out as often, and when it does, it will heal faster.
13. I will get fewer illnesses.
14. I will be able to do daily tasks with greater ease.

My whole life I’ve been skinny as a rail. Even after giving birth to four babies, each time I lost all the baby fat within about six months. It wasn’t until I turned 39 that I suddenly gained ten pounds. What you might not realize is that skinny people are out of shape, too, if they are not exercising. When I ran up a flight of stairs, my heart felt squished.

As soon as I realized I had accidentally gained ten pounds, I set myself the goal of losing ten pounds over the summer. I would exercise five days a week and eat healthier. I tenaciously stuck to my goal. After three weeks of exercising so hard that I sometimes wanted to puke, I wasn’t losing weight; I was gaining it! In desperation, I would sometimes run on the treadmill for an hour and a half out of sheer anger and frustration that my body wouldn’t respond to what I was commanding it to do. I did not want to admit that I had reached middle age. I noticed a gray hair on my head, and I quickly pulled it out without telling my husband. I didn’t want him to know that I was old.

Week three I was so “desanimada” (Spanish for no oomph left). I called my sister, who was a normal woman who had gone on lots of diets and lost weight many times. I’ve never been on a diet. I didn’t even know what I was doing. I told her I wanted to give up, that I was gaining weight, what the heck? No wonder women were upset at me back when I was skinny and I didn’t even have to work for it. The last ten pounds is impossible to get off. Except it was my only ten pounds.

My sister told me that I was gaining muscle weight. She told me, “Don’t give up now. You’ve gone through the hardest part, which is starting. If you hold on, you will start seeing results next week.”

Sure enough, like clockwork, by the end of the first month, I had lost two pounds total. But my belly was way flatter, and my husband said I looked good. Okay, I can do this, I thought. I was bummed that it was only two pounds, but it’s not really the weight that counts as much as how you fit into your jeans. More muscle will mean more weight, but more muscle means you’re more toned, which means you feel young and vibrant, not flabby and old-looking.

The second month I lost two more pounds; the third month, two more pounds. For those of you who are adding, that makes a grand total of six pounds lost during the summer, not ten. It was the first time ever that I remember not reaching a goal that I have set for myself. But it was out of my hands.

At the end of that summer, my husband and I went on a romantic weekend away. During that weekend, I could easily keep up with my husband on walks, and I didn’t feel winded when I climbed hills. My husband smiled at me.

In the middle of the night, I tripped on a step at the bed and breakfast. I splatted on the floor, threw out my back, and saw several bruises and a cut on my legs. The next morning my husband stated with gloom in his voice, “I’m not allowed to have a vacation.” I said, “Hold on. I’ve been exercising. My back will bounce back this time and won’t even hurt an hour from now.” I wasn’t sure if what I was saying would happen, but I didn’t want my husband sad. Sure enough, an hour later, my back was fine. All because I had consistently exercised for three months. (Other times that I’ve thrown out my back, I’ve been on prescription pain killer and can’t move for several days without excruciating pain. Let me tell you, the exercising was worth it!)

It took a total of six months for me, but by the end of the year, I had lost the ten pounds.