And when the moon is on the rise, they all go up to...

...Exercise!

This is one of the lines from one of our family's favorite night-night books: The Going to Bed Book by Sandra Boynton. I bring it up because I just read it to Becca as I was putting her to bed, and because I did something today that I haven't done in far too long: exercise!

I am woefully out of shape and overweight. And it's high time I did something about it. Today marks the beginning of that something. I walked (semi-briskly) on the treadmill for 30 minutes and burned about 200 calories. It's no marathon, but not a bad start.

Seeing several of my friends from seminary at Billy's wedding on Saturday helped to put in perspective the physical state of my body. Many of them are in much better shape than when we were in school together. We even joked that between Linzie and Cindy, they had lost enough weight for an entire other person. Everyone was looking great, and then there was me :( Granted, none of these other folks have children yet, and that certainly eats into your available time and energy for working out, but that's really no excuse. If anything, having a child should motivate me even more to get in shape so that I have better odds of growing old and seeing her grow up and possibly have children of her own. So, thank you to all my seminary friends who have gotten into shape over these last few years. You have inspired me (or at least shamed me) into getting in shape myself.

One of my biggest hang-ups for getting in shape is that I am not much of a morning person. If you notice the time stamps on my blog posts, you'll see that almost all of them are in the evening/night. I love to sleep in, and Becca is a champion sleeper (she still sleeps 12 hours a night with a 2 hour nap during the day!) and I rarely have much going on with the church early in the morning, so I often sleep fairly late as well - and by fairly late, I mean 8:00 or so. I just can't seem to motivate myself to get up earlier so that I can exercise by myself.

All the experts tell us that the morning is the best time to exercise because it gets your body and metabolism going and helps you to burn calories throughout the day. I have often convinced myself that if I don't exercise in the morning, then I am failing or it's just not worth doing at a different time. When it comes down to it, though, exercising in the evening has got to be much better than not exercising at all. So my plan is to start exercising in the evenings: walking/running on the treadmill, maybe doing some push-ups or sit-ups, maybe using the Wii Fit, maybe going for a walk through Bethpage, who knows. What I do know, is that it's time to make a change for the better. Here's to a healthier, happier me!