Exercise sucks.

Allow me to explain – I’m sure it will come as a huge shock to you all, but I’ve never really been much of the athletic type. Fresh air and exercise for me pretty much faded away in 1989 when my parents first introduced the Nintendo Entertainment System into my life, and it was all downhill from there! Well, actually even in a downhill scenario one would still probably manage to get some kind of exercise, so maybe something more along the lines of a sturdy, flat surface would be a little more accurate for the picture that I’m trying to paint here. You know, kind of like the sturdy, flat surface that was the area of matted-down carpet in front of my TV created from approximately one hundred million hours of playing video games throughout my childhood! Needless to say, you get the idea – I’m not much of a fan for the running and jumping and playing…

Which becomes a problem in this day and age because what I apparently did have going for me as a kid was one of those child’s metabolisms, meaning that even without exercise, I could still manage to eat roughly my own bodyweight in candy on any given night without noticing any pudgy fluctuations the following mornings by means of fat. Sadly, I must profess, it is that things simply aren’t the same these days – my video games have been replaced with a computer, I still really don’t get out all that much even when I’m not glued to the screen, and attempting to consume even half of my weight in chocolate would likely put me into a diabetic coma, the likes of which would likely even baffle fictional medical genius Dr. Gregory House! Sure, it’d be amusing to hear afterwards just how he mocked me and the possibility of waking from my coma to Dr. Cameron is quite appealing, but I think we’re getting just a tad off topic here and I’m getting closer and closer to my word count for this column with every tangent!

As I mentioned in the last column I wrote about my current bill of health, I need to start taking better care of myself and a big portion of that comes from exercising on a regular basis. Note that I said regular basis because apparently although extremely energetic and good-intentioned, my current half-hour sessions every other week just aren’t cutting the mustard … which actually has few calories to begin with, by the way. Point blank, the doc told me that I need more physical activity in my weekly routine, and that’s proving to be rather difficult for me because, well, I don’t want to do it.

It’s always easy for the “athletes” to critique us “non-athletic folks” because they get their exercise in doing something that they love! And I say it’s not fair because although I may just absolutely love surfing the Internet, it’s just not the right kind of surfing to actually burn any calories – a critical goal in our efforts at this point. Maybe if I actually enjoyed something like tennis or rugby or whatever it is that you healthy people are doing for exercise these days, the whole effort would be just a tad easier for me, but nope – we’re going to have to do this the hard way…

My main source of physical exertion thus far as been the ever-popular exercise machine – you know the type because you’ve probably got one or two of your own sitting in a spare bedroom or tucked away in the closet from that six-month period in your life when you, too, actually cared about trying to improve your own health! The specific machine that I chose to take up space in my home is the elliptical, which I believe is Latin for “hurts like hell, in a circular motion” – your experience may vary, but my personal experience has been that after merely an hour on said device, I’m relatively convinced that my legs hate me and would like to see me dead. No pain, no gain indeed.

Of course, I spent $400 on an exercise machine of my own because unlike some purveyors of physical fitness with considerably more self esteem than moi, I just can’t bring myself to exercise in public, and really that’s ok because just as much as I don’t want to do it, I know that nobody else wants to see that, either! I can accept that the local gym was really created for people who are already skinny – not couch potatoes like me looking to shave a few extra pounds off of their posteriors. Besides, having to go someplace else just adds one more obstacle to my list of excuses not to workout on any given day – at least having the thing right around the corner from my bedroom, I’ve got that lovely feeling of impending guilt for not using it overhead as I enjoy my morning buffet of pop-tarts and chocolate milk!

Aside from exercising indoors in the sporadic fashion that I currently do, I also have been trying to enjoy a little of the great Floridian outdoors every now and then, but for lack of a more colorful expletive, exercising outdoors around here can be dangerous! I’ve tried just walking around the subdivision in the evening hours after the sun has gone down, but there’s always that little voice in the back of my head wondering if some dude is going to jump out of the bushes and mug me, or if I’m going to get eaten by something, or even if something is going to jump out of the bushes, mug me and then eat me! We’ve got all sorts of sneaky predators here in Florida – the alligator, the crocodile, the armadillo – and at this point I’m not letting my guard down for anything! Lest we forget that all those knights in Monty Python and the Holy Grail did was let their guards down for a brief moment and before long, they were bunny food. I’m not falling for that trick…

So I’ll be sure to keep everyone updated on my exercising throughout the upcoming months, assuming that it actually ends up happening one of these days, that is! In the meantime, however, if anyone happens to come up with some easier ways of losing weight than exercise, do let me know because I always like to keep my options open! Preferably nothing involving needles, surgery, not eating, or anything more unpleasant than, oh say, watching an episode of the Gilmore Girls – I don’t think I’m asking too much, really.

Oh, who am I kidding – if anybody needs me, I’ll be out doing laps around the block. If I’m not back in an hour, either call an ambulance or animal control…