"Your cholesterol numbers are high. Since your family has a history of heart disease, I'd like to put you on Lipitor."
Cholesterol.
High.
Lipitor.
These three words from my primary care doctor felt like I got in hit the head - really bad.
My rationale: I was turning 50 and I was having a tug-o-war with my hormones. Not my fault!
For the past 2 years I struggled to keep the weight. In addition, I'm petite so when I whined about the 10 pounds I gained and that my clothes were tight, people dismissed me like I had weight and body image issues.
For the past two years, Mother Nature had a blast with the snow machine. I practically lived in stretchable work-out clothes which made it easy to not notice that I was gaining weight. I was in denial because I always had this genetic power to lose weight fast.
You see, when I was 25 years old, I was pregnant with my first. I weighed 95 pounds but by the time I gave birth, I was 167 pounds! After childbirth, I never lost all of the weight I had gained, remaining in the range of 105 to 118 pounds, depending on the season.
After my fourth child, I started looking into working out. It still sounds silly when I hear myself say "working out". I never consistently worked out in a gym because I got intimidated by the machines and really had no clue how to work them.
I think when women approach 40, there's a trigger that pushes us to be obsessed with working out. In my case, I was about 39 when one infomercial caught my attention. Maybe the audio and visuals were emitting subliminal messages in the frequency resonating with my brain waves. I became convinced that I, too, could be ripped and fit like the people in the infomercial. (Although I doubted my baby pouch would actually turn into a 6-pack abs. I teased my 4 kids that I had 8-fold abs courtesy of them!)
