The Weight Clause

"While visions of sugarplums danced in their heads..."

I'm pretty sure I've never had a sugarplum. But I like those spicy red and green gumdrops at this time of year. And cookies... and candy canes... and fudge... and eggnog... It's no wonder I spend much of my Christmas vacation in sweat pants. I need that expandable waistline!

You've heard of the "Freshman 15," right? A person (usually girls, it seems) goes to college and packs on 15 pounds that first year away from home and may work the following summer (or following decade) trying to lose it. During the holiday season, many of us gain the "Fa-la-la 5." It's not really a concerted effort. There's just this stream of potlucks at work and homemade treats of all sizes, shapes and flavor dancing in our heads from Thanksgiving to New Year's. How do we not gain weight?

I am doing this program at our fitness center called "The Weight Clause." It's not a weight-loss program so much as an anti-weight-gain program. There's a few requirements (like participating in a certain number of classes) but the main gist is that you will be rewarded for not gaining weight over the holidays. If you don't gain anything, you will earn a $20 class punchcard for a mere $5. If you lose a pound, you pay only $4, etc., and if you gain a pound, the price goes up a dollar to $6 and so on. It's mainly an incentive to keep up the exercise regimen we have in place (right) over this time of fatty feasting.

Hubby told me that if I got bored on the treadmill, our cable system has some "exercise on demand" programs so I decided to try that today. I just select one and do the work out. He thought he saw something like Zumba, which is my "salsa aerobics" class, but I didn't find that exactly. Instead I found some cardio dance workout that required I dust off my old Step in the basement and set that up.

The beauty of this workout is that you can hit pause and rewind -- even though it's on cable -- in case you want to review a step. The other beauty of this is having a 10-year-old curious enough to watch so he could hold the remote and I just yelled, "Pause it!" when I needed to stop and figure out a complicated move. Of course, he had to swear he wouldn't tell anyone what a dork I looked like either.

This one was a tough workout. I think I'm going to try to master it over vacation. I just don't know how long I'll have my remote controller on the couch. Once Santa comes, I think he'll have better things to do with his time. I guess I'll keep dancing with the sugarplums on my own...