I signed up for the Crafty Creative and Fit blog group as a motivator to get back to work on my fitness. (By the way, I’m using a Windows machine with explorer to check my email at the conference and I can’t see anything on the sidebar. Is that an explorer defect or did I lose my whole sidebar somehow? It looked fine on my Mac with Firefox last week.)

I had a fitness plan. I was going to be working out like a crazy woman while on vacation. Y’all can stop laughing now. It was a good plan. I would eat healthy without snacking and exercise at night. Here’s the problems.

1) Free food – to lure you to booths they give out chocolate. I’ve been surprisingly good about avoiding this. I’ve had some but I’ve not indulged as normal. They also have free soft drinks, popcorn, and pretzels. I’ve had Coke but haven’t had the others. This may be due to the management speaker (and scrawny little triathlete) discussing our credibility in preaching weight loss to patients when we are fat and not doing anything about it. He added in a comment about avoiding the free carbs in the exhibit hall. Ruined the whole thing for me.

2) Bad food – I’m in Kansas City. I’m in a hotel that hosted the Cattleman’s Ball the other night. It isn’t super vegetarian friendly. My hotel is attached to a mall with restaurants. The mall closes insanely early. So I haven’t been able to eat there. That limits my food choices to restaurants that stay open after 6. Last night I had a wonderful cheese and fruit plate as an appetizer. I should have had just that. The portobello panini I had was not good. The other night I could only get an appetizer because no matter how many times I ordered a dinner salad they wouldn’t bring it to me. When they brought the bill after I finished the spinach dip appetizer and they hadn’t charged me for the salad I gave up. I had already ordered it twice so I obviously wasn’t going to get it. I need to rush back to my hotel tonight to get to the italian restaurant before it closes.

3) Lack of workout time – I’d like to go back and workout and then eat. But with the restaurants closing by 6 I can’t do that. I hate working out after I eat. I went to the hotel gym once. I loved their elliptical machines and they totally kicked my butt. I also lifted. I did arms and abs/back. I tried out a Wii fitness that they had there. It was in the free weight area. It had a large screen TV that everyone could see so I didn’t appreciate it when it declared in BIG LETTERS that I was overweight and had my avatar suddenly balloon in size and start to pout. Like I don’t have enough body issue problems on my own without that kind of help.

4) Mirrors – Why do they put mirrors in strange location in hotel rooms? I have multiple makeup mirrors in the bathroom at the hotel. One is perfect placed to show my sitting on the toilet without clothes and it shows the image upside down. Who needs to see that? It isn’t as bad as one hotel where they had a full length mirror directly opposite the toilet. That was scary. Lest you think I’ve been totally slacking I did do plank poses in front of the mirror yesterday to check my form. I’ve got way to much fat hanging down. Scared myself but it did help my motivation.