There Goes the Exercise

December 19th, 2017

   Winter has always been a downer for the gardening me because it kills the flowers, turns lush green to dreary brown, and takes away my tasty, home-grown, heirloom tomatoes.

Burning calories? Maybe not much, but at least I’m not eating pie.

   This year, those all take a back seat to the fact that I’ve lost my main source of exercise.

   I’ve always tried to get regular exercise as a way to head off my lousy genetics and the many things that can go wrong with too many potato chips and too many hours on the couch.

   Lately, though, I’ve been counting more and more on garden-related calorie-burning as a way to counteract weight creep.

   If you’re into your 50s or 60s, you probably know what I’m talking about. Even when you eat the same (or less) and maintain the same activity, a pound creeps on here, another one there, and another one there. Before you know it, you’re 10 pounds heavier.

   Without gardening, I hate to think where I’d be. I certainly wouldn’t be wearing the same pants size as since my college days… although they are noticeably tighter than ever before.

   Despite an energy level that’s lagging almost as much as my metabolism rate, I’ve been trying hard to burn off fat via trowel and hoe.

   For me, gardening isn’t a passive activity where I mainly inspect the roses and snip off a few spent flowers every now and then.

   I go at it full tilt for hours at a time – squatting to yank weeds, lugging buckets full of compost to the bins, trimming shrubs, laying mulch, top-dressing the lawn, raking prunings, dragging hoses, bending over literally hundreds of times, and occasionally sprinting after rabbits seen nibbling on the petunias.

   All of that burns calories. At least in theory.

   What puzzles me is how I can garden the equivalent of catching a double-header baseball game and still gain two pounds when I weigh myself the next morning.

   I’m starting to conclude that while gardening might keep me from getting prematurely creaky, it’s not doing much to win the weight-creep battle.

   For that, I’ve found that food is by far the main factor.

   Even when I sit and write for a solid few days, I’ve managed to lose a few pounds by cutting way down on the calorie intake. It seems that it takes me about three hours of non-stop compost-lugging to counteract the effect of a half of a piece of cherry pie.

   Oh well. The way I look at it, at least if I’m out there gardening, I’m not inside hunting down a snack.

   That’s a problem during winter. Four months of freeze means I’ll be spending much more time nearer the refrigerator than the compost bin.

   Will power, don’t fail me.

   I really don’t want to buy bigger new pants next spring.