Exercise for the portly guy

As most of you know, I have gotten quite portly (I like that word) over the last several years.  Actually I think it is quite a good look for me along with the baldness and reading glasses, but one side of our family, Grandpa Milo, tends toward high blood pressure.  I got mine checked at the dentist the other day and they said it was good, but I got it into my head that I should start making some preventive efforts to make sure it stays OK.  I started last Friday and have done thirty minutes on the elliptical machine for five days in a row.  The plan is to take today off and then keep doing five or six days per week until my weight comes down.  I am shooting for about forty-eight pounds.

The problem is that thirty minutes on the elliptical machine is mind numbingly BORING.  I thought there was no way I was ever going to get around that, but being over fifty has tempered my desire to blast so hard on the machine that my breathing drowns out anything I might want to hear.  It is unimaginably nice to realize that I derive better health benefits from doing a slow, fat-burning workout out than one where I hammer-it-hard and be sore for a week (or two months now that I have aged a little). The bigger benefit to this approach is that I can actually listen to something while I am working out. So, three days during the week, I had Kelly and Christian sit on the couch beside the exercise machine and read me one of the read-aloud books on our homeschool schedule. It is something we have to do anyway and it makes the workout exponentially less boring.

For the two days, so far, when the kids were not there to read aloud, I have listened to an MP3 lecture on philosophy and theology over the internet. They were interesting, but I am rapidly going to run out of good lectures that are the right length.  My thought is to spin up an idea my friend, Al Rizos gave me the last time he and his family were up here. There is a company that sells entire courses of lectures called The Teaching Company. The courses are full length semester long courses, generally given by well respected professors. There are some exceptions. The course on the Historical Jesus is presented by a guy named Bart Ehrman who is definitely an agenda driven scholar, but many of the courses are not about subjects about which people have huge agendas. I think I will just have to be careful about what I buy. I am thinking about getting their course called Between the Rivers: The History of Ancient Mesopotamia to use as listening material for my workouts. I will keep you posted on how this all goes.