Posted by Elizabeth

After much hemming and hawing, the scale I purchased. And who weighs 74.4 pounds?

Last month when my mother-in-law was visiting, she was packing her bags the night before her flight.  “Where’s your bathroom scale?”  she asked.  “So I can weigh my bags.”  I responded that we didn’t have one, and she seemed a little surprised.  And I guess it is a little surprising, that I made it to the age of 31 without weighing myself.  The fact is, I’ve never found myself in need of a scale.  Whenever I’ve wanted to judge if I’m gaining or losing weight, I simply slip on a pair of pants and let my hips do the calculations.  But I bought my first scale last week, which was a surprisingly difficult decision.  Am I buying into preconceived notions about culturally-prescribed female body image issues? I wondered.  Then I reminded myself why I was buying a scale in the first place.  My workout routine had hit a plateau that I needed to push through, and before I could judge my progress, I needed to establish a baseline that would be more accurate than my jeans.

An entirely different kind of plateau (interestingly, New Mexico is full of them).

I hate plateaus.  Not the geological structures, but the developmental ones.  Plateaus are the times in life where stasis has taken root.  Some might call them “ruts,” but the imagery is all wrong.  Rather than traversing deep terrain, plateaus find us driving on auto-pilot through flat land with a landscape that never seems to change.  The problem is, we all need plateaus in our lives.  If growth and development was nothing but an upward sprint up the side of the mountain we’d exhaust ourselves.  Plateaus give us time to rest, reflect, integrate, and gather our energies for the next climbing expedition.

Lately, I have found myself on an unusual plateau.  It’s a change-a-holic’s plateau, filled not with the same old thing, but a constant flurry of new activity.  For the past six months I have done nothing but try new things.  How, you wonder, can this be a plateau?  Because plateaus are defined not by a lack of activity but by a lack of change.  And while I’ve been doing lots of “somethings,” the “somethings” are all essentially the same.

This sounds like sort of a ridiculous argument, doesn’t it?  How can one get bored with trying new things?  Simple:  anyone can get bored of anything, if trying new things becomes the same old thing.  So what’s the answer to getting off this plateau and reaching the next level of growth?  Routine. Crazy and completely paradoxical, right?  Routine is such a maligned word, a word we associate with a lack of growth and development.  We’re constantly striving to break out of routine, to “mix things up.”  But when routine is something out of the ordinary – as is the case for a change-a-holic like me – it suddenly takes on a new dimension and meaning.  Routine has never been so exciting!

The plateau breaker...or my own personal hell on earth? Only time will tell.

After months of trying a varied complement of Zumba, samba, world dance, Afro-Haitian, Latin cardio, Latin hip-hop, cardio kickbox, yoga, running, hiking, and walking, I haven’t seen much progress.  So last week I marched down to Body Language, a new fitness studio in my neighborhood featuring the Body Barre method, and plunked down $130 for a 10-session series of old-fashioned, buckle-down, high-intensity classes that are guaranteed to “change bodies one quiver at a time.”  At my first class on Friday, as my muscles quaked and quivered as promised, I wondered what I’d gotten myself into.  When I blinked away sweat beads that had drizzled into my eye, the instructor approached me, placed a kind hand on my shoulder, and said, “Don’t cry, hon, the class is almost over.”   This isn’t the type of exercise routine I’d normally take on, but when I asked the instructor if it would help me push through my plateau, she smiled and said, “Absolutely!”

In what area of your life have you reached a plateau?  Do you prefer plateaus or upward movement?  Do you think that trying new things can become just as boring as doing the same old thing, or have I completely lost my mind?