TheBanyanTree: twenty four per cent

[Mike Pingleton]

Her name is Mindy and first thing she does is take me up to the office
on the upper mezzanine, where I remove my shoes and socks.  I step up
on a machine which is not a scale so Mindy can measure my fat index.

"Twenty four per cent", she says.  I ask a couple of questions and
there is a moment of misunderstanding between us.

"No, no, it's not good.  But I've seen a lot worse", she hastens to
add.  The moment feels odd and awkward to me - a young girl barely out
of her teens coaching and supporting a man twice her age.  With his
shoes and socks off.  Measuring his fat.

I'm not extremely overweight.  I bicycle or walk to work and keep
active. But three months of traveling last fall preempted my daily
exercise, and winter enforced inactivity, and so now spring is here
and I'm carrying around extra weight around on top of the extra weight
I already carry...

I put my socks and shoes back on, pick up my drooping ego while I'm at
it.  We go out to the exercise room, which is the whole mezzanine
above the basketball courts and the gymnastics arena.  There are
eighteen weight machines out there, and on a clipboard I have a blue
card with all eighteen listed, with room to record my progress on each
one.

Mindy takes me to each machine, explaining how it works and what
muscle groups it affects.  I try them out, one by one, and establish a
starting weight.  It turns out I'm only using fourteen of the machines
to start my program.  Next we have a go on the treadmills and the
ellipticals and the stationary bikes.  This is all new territory for
me - last time I worked out in a gym, all we had were free weights. 
All of this other stuff hadn't been around.

Mindy decides her little bird is ready to fly on his own, and leaves
me to work thru the program.  On this machine, I pull down and make
the weights go up.  I push up on the next one, and then I lift weights
with my legs.  And so it goes.  I finish each machine and then write
down the weight and number of reps on my blue card.  Not too bad, I
think.  I can do this.  Afterwards I try out the treadmill and the
elliptical.  It doesn't take me long to figure out that I can burn
more calories on the elliptical - that's the one I'm going to do, I
decide.

Every other day I head over to the gym.  The first week I am sore
beyond belief, but after that it gets better.  Muscle memory kicks in,
and a little release of pleasurable brain chemicals each time I begin.
 I add weights to each machine; sometimes I add reps.  The elliptical
machine is kicking my ass, however; it takes a few more weeks before
I'm making significant progress.

Seven weeks pass, and then I am back in the office with Mindy, sans
footwear.  "You're at twenty two per cent, and you've lost two
pounds".  I make a cautious inquiry.  "Oh yeah, that's pretty good. 
It means you've probably turned five or six pounds of fat into muscle,
and we want to keep that at a slow and steady rate".  I show her my
blue cards; I'm on my second one now.  I can see her eyes widen a bit.
"Wow, NOBODY fills these out completely," she says.  "I'm impressed". 
If I'm paying for this privilege, I tell her, then I'm going to do it
right.  I walk out of the office feeling a lot better this time.

Every other day or every third day I'm in the gym.  I can feel myself
slowly changing - my pants are looser at the waist, my shirts are
tighter, especially across the upper torso.  My cravings have changed;
ice cream and pie have given way to protein.  I'm making progress.  My
weight program now takes an hour to get thru, up from a half hour. 
I'm up to forty minutes on the elliptical.  I'm feeling better,
stronger.

I ran into Mindy yesterday on my way upstairs.  "We need to get you in
for another assessment in a couple weeks, maybe before the end of
May", she said.  It's a date, kiddo.