We are at the end of our 7^th week on Body for Life. A lot has happened this week, too!
 

For starters, since the beginning of this challenge, we have been wishing we had the proper equipment to do our lower body workouts the way they’re meant to be done. The Bowflex simply is not powerful enough to handle the strain of the heavier tension rods we need for our leg workouts. Even with the lower leg attachment piece. Actually, the lower leg attachment piece is designed so poorly that you’re more likely to suffer an injury while attempting to position yourself on the attachment than you are to getting a great workout.
 

After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, we begrudgingly decided to go back to using the stairs. However, we need to be increasing the intensity, so I went out and bought two 5-lb dumbbells. The problem with this theory, though, is that by the end of this challenge, we should be lugging an extra 60 pounds with us up and down the stairs, if we’re going to be increasing the intensity each week. I don’t know about you, but my hands and wrists are not able to withstand 60 pounds of dead weight for very long. Our original plan was to get some dumbbells and then purchase the home gym at the end of this challenge, until I thought of this problem.
 

We considered purchasing a weight vest that could accommodate an additional 100 pounds, but the weight vests are very expensive.  It didn’t seem all that practical to drop several hundred dollars on a weight vest we would only use for 5 more weeks. We started thinking about dumbbells again. If we went with dumbbells, we could readjust our upper body workout and use dumbbells instead of the Bowflex. We had a sneaking suspicion that a weight tension workout is not nearly as effective as a dead-weight workout.
 

This theory was proven when we had a heavy discussion about the timing of the purchase of the home gym. We will be finishing our first challenge in early September. About a week after we finish, we are going on vacation for a week to the Outer Banks. I am a contractor. That means for every hour I don’t work, I don’t get paid. However, due to the weird pay schedule I have, I will be receiving 3 paychecks in August. We’d decided to save one of the paychecks to cover the week of vacation and help pay for the home gym. Because of the weird pay schedule, we have to be very careful about scheduling bill payments. And due to the weird scheduling, we’ll have to actually use some of that “extra” paycheck to make sure no bills get paid late. So in essence, we won’t have as much money saved from that paycheck when we needed it. Not enough to comfortably go on vacation, lose a week’s worth of pay, and pay for a home gym.
 

I desperately, desperately need a vacation, and I had kind of a mini-meltdown when I discovered we couldn’t do everything we wanted. Do we give up the vacation or the home gym? Despite needing a vacation, I was willing to give it up for the purchase of a home gym. My brain likes to spend money on tangible, long-lasting items. The home gym fits this profile. But Stefan, recognizing my frazzled state and clearly tired of hearing about the dreadful stories I bring home about this horrible, stupid, no-good job that I hate with every fiber of my being, told me we were going on vacation. This vacation is a chance of a lifetime. Some friends of ours are renting one of those verrrrrry expensive beach houses for a week and invited us down. We only need to contribute to food. Mind you, a week in one of these houses can run as much as $8,000 a week on the off-season (yes, you read that right). We would not be able to afford a house like that for a great many years.
 

The home gym could wait. We’d spend a couple hundred dollars getting a dumbbell set that was large enough to grow into until we can get the home gym. We have clearly outgrown the Bowflex, so we need something to get us by until we can purchase the home gym. We could go out and buy it on credit, but we don’t want to.
 

Back to proving my theory that 50 pounds of tension is not equivalent to 50 pounds of dead-weight. Stefan purchased the new Bowflex Selecttech dumbbell set. It’s a pair of dumbbells on a stand where you simply turn a dial and the correct weight is added/removed from the dumbbell. No need to buy tons of weight plates and taking them off and putting them on. It takes up a lot less room than a whole set of dumbbells of various weights. Each dumbbell holds a maximum of 52.4 pounds. I could barely lift a single dumbbell! Meanwhile, I can pull a 50 pound tension rod. I think using the dumbbells will significantly accelerate our already amazing results.
 

This week has been pretty crazy. I had an interview Wednesday morning, and a career fair to attend that evening (which resulted in a call the following day for an interview). In our haste to try and find a better lower body workout solution, we changed the way we were doing our crunches this week. Unfortunately, we weren’t thinking clearly and we did it on the heaviest rep and Stefan hurt his back pretty badly. He has a broken vertebrae from a previous accident, and apparently the way he pulled during the crunch really aggravated the muscles surrounding the broken vertebrae. Now we have to try to patiently wait until it heals. I’m telling you, something good is happening when you get angry that you cannot work out! No wonder athletes tend to re-injure themselves when they push it when they’re supposed to be healing. I finally get it.
 

I was gone for over 12 hours on Wednesday and I was pretty beat. Stefan’s back was hurting him and he was upset about having to hold off exercising. So we had a cheat evening. We went down to Brother’s for a pizza and a beer. And it was good.
 

We’re not going to exercise again until Sunday. If his back feels better. Luckily, we have a week to spare before going on vacation, so we actually have somewhat of a built-in time cushion in case of accidents.
 

We are still seeing results, though. It’s amazing how many hiding places the body has for fat. In your face, your neck, the back of your arm, you name any body part and your body stores some fat there. Stefan is literally changing before my eyes! He says I am too, but it’s difficult to recognize change in myself. I’m tempted to open up that bag of small sized clothing and see if a size 8 fits yet, but I’m scared. I know I’ve lost about 2 inches in my chest/ribcage area. Not sure if the fat loss has traveled down yonder.
 

The inability to recognize that we are losing weight equally applies to when we are gaining weight and losing shape. I’ve become much more aware of how many people are in denial about how they look. Everywhere we go, there is at least one person who is wearing something that is clearly too small for their current weight/shape. If they knew how they actually looked, they would never be caught dead in public looking like that. Nobody purposely goes out with the intent of looking fat. That mirror in the mind’s eye really is no better than a funhouse mirror.