My heart goes out to people who need to lose a lot of weight\u2014and I have the utmost admiration for anyone who successfully loses 50, 70, 100 pounds or more. What makes me feel this way? Probably the fact that I\u2019ve been trying, unsuccessfully<\/em>, to lose the same eight pounds for the past 18 years. Yes, you read that right. Eight pounds, 18 years. Apparently, my motto when it comes to portion control is \u201cI don\u2019t wanna.\u201d<\/p>\n I used to be able to use the excuse that it was baby weight. Not anymore. Although some of my kids are still young, those<\/em> are the adopted ones. The last time my uterus actually grew anything useful was 18 years ago. I wanted to find some way to take off that weight\u2014some way that didn\u2019t involve portion control. <\/p>\n I use a treadmill five days each week. Clearly, that hasn\u2019t been enough, so one of my daughters suggested that I try her big blue exercise ball. I scuttled down to the basement, hoping for a little privacy. Sadly, one of my younger kids got curious and decided to tag along.<\/p>\n I cranked up the volume on the instructional DVD that came with the ball, determined to keep up with the perky, uber-fit woman in the program.<\/p>\n She sat on her blue ball, put her hands behind her head and started firing off a rapid succession of sit-ups. Looked pretty straightforward. So I sat on my blue ball, put my hands behind my head and leaned back. That\u2019s when I noticed something odd. Her<\/em> blue ball was just sitting there underneath her, immobile, like a big, rubbery chair with no back support. My<\/em> blue ball appeared to be packed with rabid squirrels. It shook and shimmied and squirmed side-to-side until, with a vaguely fart-like sound, it shot out from underneath me and rolled away.<\/p>\n I retrieved my squirrel-infested ball, told the laughing gnome in the doorway to get lost, and decided to try again.<\/p>\n Now, the lady on the DVD was doing a sideways<\/em> sit-up thing. She was actually lying on her right side<\/em> on the ball, hands behind her head, lifting her whole torso up toward the ceiling and holding it there while she counted to 10 billion. So I gripped the ball with both hands while I got myself positioned on my right side. Then I let go of the ball, put my hands behind my…<\/p>\n The rabid squirrels weren\u2019t done with me, yet. The ball started shaking wildly, as if in the throes of an earthquake that only a blue ball could feel. It shot out from underneath me and I landed, quite hard and quite painfully, on the concrete floor.<\/p>\n The gnome in the doorway was bent over laughing, but he kindly kicked the ball back to me so I wouldn\u2019t have to stop.<\/p>\n I decided to give it one more shot. The woman in the video was now lying face-down on her ball doing some sort of yoga-like stretch with her arms (a \u201creach for the ceiling\u201d kind of thing). It looked like something even I<\/em> could do. So I lay face-down down on the ball, planted my toes on the floor and reached for the ceiling. I was able to hold the pose for two blissful seconds before my feet slipped and I turned into a human teeter-totter. My legs shot up in the air and my face and chest slammed into the concrete floor. The rabid squirrels freaked, the ball fired out from underneath me and I landed, belly-flop style, on the floor. At this point, the gnome in the doorway was laughing so hard he was wheezing.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve returned the blue exercise ball to the kid who uses it daily, and I\u2019ve gone back to the treadmill. I haven\u2019t lost any weight, but at least I\u2019ve avoided another concussion.<\/p>\n Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to my blog and you\u2019ll never miss my monthly posts (plus I\u2019ll send you a free copy of There\u2019s Nothing Wrong With Claudia<\/em> to say thanks). It\u2019s easy: Just enter your email address in the upper right corner of this page. I\u2019ll never sell, share, or rent your contact information.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My heart goes out to people who need to lose a lot of weight\u2014and I have the utmost admiration for anyone who successfully loses 50, 70, 100 pounds or more. What makes me feel this way? Probably the fact that I\u2019ve been trying, unsuccessfully, to lose the same eight pounds for the past 18 years. 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