Weight a Minute

I've been working out quite a bit lately, in an attempt to unclog the arteries I filled with cholesterol and laziness during an unusually busy school year. I've attended yoga classes, lifted weights, and tried to run on the treadmill, only to find that I have the stamina of a fat house cat. Little by little, though, I've been building up my strength and the number of minutes I can work out before feeling like I might vomit.

**As an aside, my mom gets up at 4:30 or 5:00 every morning to work out. At this moment in time she can both outrun and outwalk me. But I can totally beat her in Jeopardy. (If the category was "teeth.")

I've worked out a routine at the gym now. I do my workout until I feel like I'm going to throw up, and then I walk a cool down 1/4 mile. After the 1/4 mile walk, I wash my hands with the hand sanitizer (obsessive compulsive, I know) and then I walk back to the locker room to weigh myself.

The locker room in our gym is very nice and almost brand new. It has lockers (of course--otherwise they'd have to call it something else), mirrors, showers, etc... and it even has a sleeping room. The sleeping room is located behind a glass door. Just inside the sleeping room is where the one and only scale can be found. I suspect that the scale was placed in this area for privacy, although the aforementioned glass door perhaps takes away from the security of the place.

Generally, after I finish my workout, I pop into the sleeping room and weigh myself. As I was going to complete this routine last week, I stopped dead in my tracks when I rounded the corner and looked through the glass door and found that a woman, who was very nearly naked, was occupying the scale. She stood, glaring at the number on the scale, wearing nothing but a threadbare pair of underwear and an equally threadbare brassiere.

I can only guess that she had stripped down to her skivvies to bring that number on the scale down lower, but I wish that I could have told her there's a better way to decrease that number. Obviously, she doesn't know "Lauren's Rules of Weighing Yourself."

Lauren's Rules of Weighing Yourself:

Step onto the scale in whatever clothes or shoes you happen to be wearing, then answer the following questions and determine your actual weight.
Are you wearing tennis shoes? If yes, subtract 2 pounds.
Are you wearing a purse? If yes, subtract at least 5 pounds.
Do you have long hair? If yes, subtract 1 pound.
Do you have big boobs? If yes, subtract 1 to 3 pounds (according to size).
If you have on make up, hair gel, and earrings, subtract at least one pound.
If you haven't used the restroom today, subtract 1 pound.
If you just ate, subtract 2 pounds because that food hasn't been digested and divided up by your cells yet, so it doesn't count.
Did you just finish working out? If yes, subtract 2 pounds. It's probably just the sweat in your clothes weighing you down.
Finally, if you're just feeling sad that day, subtract 3 to 5 pounds. The scale is probably wrong anyway. Stupid scale.

Once you go through Lauren's Rules, you realize that you weigh far less with your clothes on than with all of them off. In fact, the last time I weighed myself and used all the rules, I found that my REAL weight is actually 17 pounds. That's hot.