Good morning world! I’ve been doing Noom (a weight loss program based on psychology and calorie counting) for three weeks now and I’ve lost weight, 182 to 178. I’ve also started exercising, doing various dance workouts I can watch on YouTube and I bought access to an older Zumba program for about US$10.

My goal is to be down 40 pounds by the end of the year. We’ll see if that happens, but heck anything is good for me right now.

Thanks to utterly incompetent gym/physical education teachers in elementary school, high school and college, I have to surmount the hate they instilled in me for exercise. They never taught *how* to do exercise or sports, and if I wasn’t good to begin with, they had no use for you at all. I was just a problem for them that they simply were too lazy or incompetent to deal with. The art teachers did much the same, too lazy to teach how to draw, how to think like an artist, etc.

I was very uncoordinated as a kid. I was put in a special class for learning coordination. That was hard since I was very smart for my age (reading at a 6th grade level in 2nd grade), but my physical skills were a bit delayed. So, I was the “other” in so many ways. I also simply would rather read a book than jump rope, and ooooh that was just not “normal”.

The President’s Council on Physical Fitness didn’t help either, with its idiotic “tests” on how well kids could do broad jumps, jumping jacks, etc.

So, years later, my husband taught me *how* to throw and gee, I’m not bad at it! I had to learn that damn few can do a 30 minute aerobics routine at the beginning, and after an exertion induced headache that knocked me to my knees and made me sure I was dying, I learned that I have to slowly build up to that.

I still do hate that ignorance and laziness from teachers that I trusted to know what they were doing. It held me back for decades. Happily, I’m now an artist, getting paid for my work, and now I’m working on being as physically able as I am mentally.

Try things even if you are sure you “aren’t any good”. This helps cast off the shackles put on you by others who weren’t worth the time or respect you gave them.