Back To The Ol' Grind

Happy New Year, folks! I hope everyone had a great holiday, filled with fun, food, family & friends.

Now that THAT's over with...

It's back to the ol' grind. Not only are we all (well, most of us) back to work, it's also time to assess the damage that the Holiday eating binge did to the relatively new fitness regime.

Surprisingly, I didn't fare as badly as I thought I would after what felt like a solid week of non-stop eating, and my trusty treadmill sitting idly by, approximately 600km away. Only a half-inch gained here and there. It could have been a lot worse.

Seriously.

Have you ever celebrated Christmas with an Italian family? We go "back home" each year for the Holidays, where my mother feels it's her maternal duty to make sure we all eat as much as (or slightly more than) is humanly possible. After all, she's not here with us for most of the year, so we must be starving, right? The fact that I could pass for Rita McNeil's stunt double has apparently escaped her notice.

If the lasagna, manicotti and canelloni aren't enough for you, you could also have some soup, meatballs, sausages and other various animal body parts that are thrown into the pot to make the sauce for the pasta. We managed to convince her for the first time this year that we absolutely DO NOT need a roast of some sort to go with our salad at the end of the meal.

But no amount of arguing could get Mom to limit herself to two cakes for the night. Cheesecake is a must, after all. It's tradition. And so is the sponge cake she makes every time we visit, insisting that it's my husband's favourite (to his immense surprise). But the one that really took the cake, so to speak, was the double-decker chocolate cake with chocolate frosting for the kids, even though the smell of chocolate makes her gag. They NEED chocolate cake, she will vehemently argue every time. Not want ... NEED. Mom refused to listen to our arguments that children do not NEED chocolate cake at 11:00 at night, which is when dinner is over, because it takes that long to eat Christmas dinner at Mom's house, after all.

So, yes, I'm quite surprised and pleased to find that I've only regained half an inch in a couple of spots over the past couple of weeks, all things considered. But, now the holidays are over, the leftovers have been dealt with, the New Year has begun, and my battle of the bulge has resumed. Hello treadmill, old friend. I've picked up a couple of Friends episodes on DVD to make our time together pass a little more quickly. Next week, we introduce my butt to the floor for some leg lifts, crunches and push-ups.

Happy New Year, back-side. I hope I'll be seeing a lot less of you from here on in. ;)