So far, this is what I've got: I've read the foreword carefully. Jillian is very committed to being your god. That makes me uncomfortable. But she's also very into the whole mental preparation, if you believe in yourself, you can do it! Exclamation points! And that's something that is extremely dorky, but also kind of nice. Okay, Jillian! Let's do this thing! High five! Please don't kill me!
Before you begin, there are pages of preparations that one must make. She suggests "goodbye photos," which I'm going to have to skip, mostly because I am not down with photographic evidence of me in my underpants. Maybe you are braver than me. Then there's body fat analysis, measurements, and a fitness test, all of which make me want to close the book, go get a cupcake, and frost it with butter. But okay. I've got a Tanita scale. I've just got to figure out how it works, with the body composition. And the fitness tests are all easy to perform at home, and make me very sad. Push-ups? DO NOT WANT. But I'll do it. And I'll post my results in the comments, and you can laugh at me. And then, you better be posting yours.
In the meantime, I've calculated my basal metabolic rate (the minimum number of calories my body requires to allow me to lie in bed all day and keep breathing). If it's to be believed, that's 1,410 calories a day. That seems terribly low. I am not going to worry too much about sticking to this number--I'm going to try to stick, instead, with the general eating plan as a guideline--it emphasizes a lot of cooking healthy stuff at home, avoiding sweets and alcohol and drinking a lot of water, and that sounds pretty reasonable to me.
The recipe section is organized in an irritating way, and it took me an endless amount of flipping back and forth between the meal plan and the pile of jumbled recipes to figure out a grocery list, which is two pages long. For five days, to start. The whole thing is starting to make me wonder what, exactly, I'm doing here, and can't I just keep eating granola bars for every meal? No? ----- .
There's also way too much flipping back and forth between the exercise plan for each day and the description of the exercises in the back of the book. I kept losing my place. I kept getting frustrated. I wanted to rip apart the book with my teeth, which is totally aerobic. I persevered, however, and wrote out my exercise plan for the next week. I wrote down the descriptions and even drew helpful stick-figure diagrams (you want me to do what with my left ankle and my right elbow?) and I am sure I will look just the tiniest bit insane at the gym tomorrow, pulling out my crumpled sheet of paper and consulting it between manic yankings at the various weight machines, but I'm okay with that. I think. Please don't let the gym be crowded.
So. Preliminary preparations: prepared. Loins: girded. Grocery shopping: tonight. The gym: tomorrow. Am I ready? No! But I'm going to do it anyway. Are you ready?
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