Sign Me Up for Some Torture

I went to the doctor today for my annual poke-prod-smoosh-jab. All that’s bad enough, but what I really wasn’t looking forward to was the command to “hop up on the scale.”

Turns out, I’m up three pounds from last year. An unwelcome trend.

Sod it!

I’ve no one to blame but myself and what’s worse, almost exactly one year ago, I thoroughly documented how I was going to pull up my socks and get back on track with sane dietary choices and regular exercise.

Clearly, I have no discipline.

But I’ve simply got to do something about these zaftig abs of mine. Something drastic. Today I looked in to taking some Pilates classes. Imagine my shock when I clicked on the site of one local Pilates studio and found this freak-ass sequence of photos!

What on Earth is going on? It looks kinda like torture to me. And doesn’t that Joseph Pilates guy creep you out? Old men should always wear shirts.

And as if that weren’t enough, it turns out that one of the key pieces of equipment is a Spanish Inquisitiony-looking contraption called the reformer.

It’s all rather off-putting, but I’d still like to give it a try. For some reason, part of the appeal is how daft and crackpot it appears to be, but I know at least one person who swears by it. Plus, the promise that Pilates will help me build a “girdle of strength between the rib cage and the pelvis” sounds like something I desperately need. I am currently scraping by with a girdle of extreme weakness and rounded flabbiness.