Shimmy On Out Of Here

We had a family member’s birthday dinner this evening. I always find it toughest at these sit down functions to eat as well as I would like because I am concerned that I will hurt people’s feelings if I don’t gorge myself on what they made. I also sometimes worry that I will be looked at strangely for demonstrating such a different approach to festive eating than I used to display. I think that I did pretty well though; I kept my portions down and took it slowly, making sure that I put my fork down a lot in between bites. It’s all about retraining myself – not to consume different foods at these events per say, but rather to change the way in which I actually go about eating.

On a totally different topic, I just had the absolute worst workout of this journey! Wow, it was simply awful! Over a year ago a friend and I were in a store and I pointed out a bellydancing DVD set that I thought looked interesting. This particular friend has dabbled minorly in bellydancing and thought that it looked good enough that she bought the videos and promptly lent them to me. I was thrilled but, being the procrastinator I am, I let them sit for quite a while before finally attempting the introduction one. I remember that I was not overly impressed when I eventually tried it, but I was exercising in a very small space and my heart just wasn’t into it, so I put the set away to try again another day.

Today was the day and… well… it sucked. I am woman enough to admit when something is difficult and I am not too proud to embrace my own limitations, but neither of those have to come into play here whatsoever. This DVD was horrible! I am not sure if they were trying to sell a date with the bleach blond bombshell who was ‘demonstrating’ the bellydance moves, or if the film editor just had a series of embolisms when he was doing his job, but I really did not need to see more close-ups of that woman’s face than shots of the actual dance. Seriously, at least half of that tape must have been of her smiling as she slowly counted, “…sssixxxx, seeveennn, aaannnd eeeiiight.” They even went so far as to throw in a couple slow motion shots of her, akin to something I would expect to see in a late night phone sex advertisement when the camera pans across one of those high-haired, pouty-lipped girls! It was ridiculous!

The worst thing was that they didn’t actually show the majority of the moves! The camera focused so much on her upper body that I still have no idea what most of the leg movements are supposed to look like. It’s as if the people involved thought that half the fun of an introduction video is letting the viewer guess whether or not they are doing things correctly. Plus, it didn’t even get my heart rate up at all, and I just ended up feeling like I wasted forty-five minutes of my life.

(Note that everything I have stated before now was written a little earlier in the night, and this paragraph is actually an edit done prior to posting.) Since I am a sucker, and because I wanted to ensure that I was being completely unbiased in my harsh review of this entire exercise set based on just a single video, I popped in the second one to give it a try. Now in all fairness, initially, I was pleasantly surprised that it was different enough from the first one to warrant continuing the workout and not just ripping the DVD out of the player in frustration after the first two minutes. The concentration on the blond’s face was somewhat minimized and they had done a much better job of providing wider screenshots to allow the viewer to actually see the majority of what was being demonstrated. However, the teaching was still poor and rushed, one of the most important elements continued to be the wardrobe changes, and it inevitably left me wanting to smack the woman by the end.

The sad part is that I have always thought that bellydancing looked like it would be really fun to learn, but these videos have kind of dampened my enthusiasm to pursue it right now. I honestly feel that they did a disservice to a normally beautiful form of artistic expression. I’ll tell you one thing… I am so glad that I wasn’t the one who spent the money on that DVD set. I was feeling pretty guilty about having kept it for so long – not that my friend ever asked for it back – but now I’m thinking that I was doing her a huge favour!

FOOD & BEVERAGES:
- 11 glasses of water throughout the day
- 1 banana
- 1 toasted whole wheat English muffin with light strawberry jam
- 1/4 cup unsalted cashews
- 2 slices of mustard and brown sugar glazed ham with mustard
- 1/4 cup canned corn
- 1 white dinner roll with butter
- 2 sweet pickles
- 3/4 cup scalloped potatoes
- 2/3 cup rainbow sherbet
- 1 coconut shortbread cookie
- 2 1/2 cups Caesar salad with fat free dressing, dried cranberries, and croutons

EXERCISE:
- 1 hour and 25 minutes of bellydancing videos completed in 2 sessions (45 minutes long and 40 minutes long)