So first of all, we get in there and they put Sam up on this stationary bike, slap some type of metal headband on him, cram a tube into his mouth and make him start pedaling…ugh. And I’m next? Now Sam’s done this before so he gets the whole thing.  Me???  Nope.

So now it’s my turn… “How hard do I pedal? For how long? I have to breathe through this tube? What about the inevitable slobber associated with panting while your mouth is open??”

Whatever. I just jump up and start cruising. Sam tells me it’s all about the watts. Of course I have no idea what those are so he says to put it at about 70 rpm’s and keep it there. That’s measurable for me. Got it. Rpms at 70. So I go easy at about 68.  But every minute the pedaling gets harder. By minute 5 they’re telling me, “one more minute” so I lay it on and start sprinting: 75,80,100rpms. And I crank the rest of that minute at about 145 rpms everyone’s hooting me on….but the watts aren’t changing.  Cause it doesn’t matter and I’m still confused, “Watts?? I understand speed, rpms, incline and level.” I still don’t know what any of that meant except that I have the muscle to sprint but not the fitness to endure. Okay. Got it. Not fit enough. I worked hard for that lack of endurance over these last handful of years, so I guess I earned it.

Now, the weight? Should be 112. I’m at 117. May not mean anything to you but for me, I’ve never weighed more than 112 unless I was on my way up or down from pregnancy.  No big deal. I really wouldn’t care about the weight if I knew I was keeping good habits. But I haven’t been and my weight reflects that. now, I could say I have a weight goal but I really don’t. I have a weight suspicion: I suspect my weight will be closer to 112 when I’m in the kind of fitness shape I want to be in. I guess we’ll see.

Now the fat: usually sitting at about 13% I’m now at 15%. ( I swear I thought I was at about 22% weird.) This is the most curious part of it to me. Being as I’m 49, I want to know how my dedication to fitness and nutrition will affect that number. A doctor told me point blank that when we hit this age women automatically add 2 % of body fat. Okay. Well, let’s see.

Over all the test wasn’t that hard. and it was worth gathering all that pertinent information right?  I mean it’s always nice to know what percentage of your body is useful and what percentage is only good for keeping you warm enough to dive 6,000 meters to retrieve shell fish from the bottom of the Atlantic ocean…ha!

Today I’m beginning my blog for the fitness challenge. I’ve entitled it Flirting With 50

because each day I write I want to remind myself why I’m doing this. Not that I don’t already know but I’m of the firm belief that the practice of anything rather than merely the knowledge of it is what brings about transformation. Writing out the words Flirting With 50 reminds me that, yes, time is passing and with each day that passes I’m creating my life. What’s my life going to look like when I’m fifty in 11 months?  So here we go..

TEAM NEWS:  Team Malibu is trying to get its poop in a scoop. That means we’re all kind of taking our time on the sculptor and deciding which week to actually begin the 6 week curriculum. Kim is traveling, Stuart is wanting to fast first. Jessica is in Sweden. Got to catch up with Nori and Jen. Sam’s…well Sam is Sam.  I’m working like a fiend creating all the content for this site. But we have a plan, and that is to meet up on Sunday, take a team photo and set the actual start date. Advice: have a smaller team!!

For me personally, it’s the day of reconning: I’m going in to have my fitness actually evaluated.  Not like “how do you feel today?” kind of evaluated but blood test, maximum VO, resting and max heart rate, weight, FAT percentage….ugh.  and I’m going to admit…I’m prepared for the worst. Like I said, these past 7 years have been a real doozy for me. And although I wouldn’t call myself a couch potato, my usual 5-6 day a week workouts have been reduced to 2- 3 days of cardio only plus a few days of playing in the surf…..(not exactly training)  and as far as my food intake goes, I’m not an over eater, but I’ve become a very unconscious eater. I don’t feed my body enough of the right food. And I eat in passing.  Whatever is there, I eat. It’s a left over habit from the days of rebuilding my home after we lost everything in a fire while simultaneously caring for my father who was fighting for his life through his battle with lung cancer. I call it eating emergency rations in passing, unconscious eating. But the emergency is over. Back to creating my habits and my life rather than having them create me.

Okay here’s what we need to know about me. When I was training here’s what some of the facts looked like:

Weight: 103-112 depending upon the type of training I was in

% of body fat: 10- 13%

These past 7 years have been the most unconscious years of my life in terms of my health and fitness. Today, we’re going to see the result of that. The bad news is we’re going to SEE the result of that.  The great news is this is my first step toward the health and fitness I desire…change is in the air and I’m looking forward to it….even if the first step forward is…measuring my fat???? Ugh!  Every gal’s worst nightmare right?  I need a mantra, an intention for this day of physical examination. How about , “ Today, my intention is to love myself enough to look at what is.”  …Why is it we don’t need a mantra or intention or prayer to get into those Tollhouse cookie days??

Its funny, I was talking to a couple of the new, young actors on Pretty Little Liars and they were a bit befuddled by the whole Twitter thing. They were saying, “It’s weird. People think they know me but they don’t. And what do I say to them?  Then I started talking to them about “back in the day,” and realized,  ooh man,  I’m old!  I heard myself talking about the days we had only 3 tv networks and phones with chords attaching the handset to the base, or having to stand in the kitchen “wired” to the wall as I tried to privately speak to my boyfriend amidst the bustle of dinner time. Suddenly I felt like I was grandma taking about her use of carrier pigeons or something. But you know the coolest thing?  All this twittering allows me to engage with fans of every age, every race, every religion. And I absolutely love it.  In a day and age when everyone seems so segregated by like and kind, the young/the old, coach /first class, hip hop/rock and roll, the left/the right. Even our cell phones separate us from the amazing  goings on around us. It’s kind of nice to meet everyone away from their usual groupings.  Doing so allows me to engage with the person without a label.  And it allows us to engage as individual people whose agendas aren’t about politics or religion or marketing or domination but about contact. Pure and simple. It’s about the need for people to connect. So Twitter, thanks for bringing the world together. Without all those label barriers it’s much easier to see that we really are all one. Such a sweet sweet tweet. @nia_peeples

At age 16 I went to work at Pam’s figure salon in West Covina—my very first job. My duties were simple: Teach aerobics…sell memberships. Clean the hot tub… sell memberships. Tout the grapefruit diet… sell memberships. Strap women onto those ridiculous vibrating belt contraptions that were meant to shake the fat away… sell memberships. For the entire year I worked at Pam’s I enthusiastically counted out their repetitions on the weight machines, handed them list after list of the latest diets, picked them up off the floor after having been thrown to the ground by the vibrating fat- melter and coax them into extra aerobics classes—I was great at the fitness part. But how did I sell memberships? By convincing those women that if they signed a lengthy membership contract they could be thinner by Christmas. It was that simple. Because all any of them wanted was to look thinner. To them, being fit meant being thin. And the truth was despite all my efforts to get these women fit, I had very few success stories. How could I have known that what I should have been teaching these women was not how to get fit and stay fit, but why.

Despite what appears to be a national obsession with fitness 63% of Americans are overweight. That’s over six out of ten. Adult obesity is at an all time high—in fact, it’s epidemic. Childhood obesity in the United States has more than tripled in the past two decades. And it isn’t as if we are not a body conscious society. Every grocery store checkout line has at least one rag mag exhibiting a photo of some poor celebrity with a headline that screams “Too Fat?” “Too Thin?” “Is She safe?” Yet, ironically, right next to those gossipy “Janet Bulks Up To 180 Pounds!!” magazines are all the fitness and fashion mags each claiming to have the inside scoop on how to get fit. Information on how to get fit is everywhere. It exists on dvd and on television. There are entire networks dedicated to the subject. I Googled “how to stay fit” and found 4,380,000 sites offering information on the subject. We have the most innovative machines, the most beautifully shot workout dvd’s. We have fat farms, boot-camps, exotic fitness get-aways. We even have no fat, no calorie “food” lining the shelves of grocery isles dedicated to supplying American consumers with the latest products to help them eat their way to being fit. Yet our growing population (and I mean that literally) of overweight adults and a new generation of sedentary children are living proof that simply telling people “how” to get fit is not working, It’s not working any better now than it did for me at Pam’s Figure Salon back in 1977.

In the years since I have tried dozens of fitness products and regimens, from weight training, and yoga, to food combining and exotic tea concoctions. I have owned Universal gyms, stationary bikes and elliptical walkers. I’ve belonged to dance studios, dojos and Pilates studios. And after all that sweating and all those calories burned, what have I learned? Simply this: that the best way for me to get fit and stay fit is to focus not on how but on why. So why do I remain so committed to fitness? To appear on a cover of a magazine or look great on the red carpet? No. I stay fit so I can play roller hockey with my son, and hula dance with my daughter or pick her up and carry her from the couch to her bed when she’s fallen asleep watching Hatari with grandpa. Being fit lets me hike the Dolomites with my Italian friends or tandem surf with my beautiful husband, dropping into a tube while holding hands. It allows me to answer the call from all my single girlfriends who need a hand moving or cleaning out the garage. But being fit isn’t just about relentless activity. It also allows me to relax. I can say no thanks to a triathlon and yes to wine tasting on girls night out. Or help myself to birthday cake at the PTA meeting without wanting to hang myself the next day. For me fitness is freedom.- freedom to experience, to explore, to express. It may also mean being thin or having what you consider to be a great shape and that’s fantastic. But fitness’ greatest reward is that it gives you the freedom to do the things you want to do; to be the person you choose to be.

So if I found myself back at Pam’s Figure Salon in downtown West Covina I think I’d replace all those copies of the grapefruit diet with one mandatory membership application. It would consist of 10 blank pages and one question: “Why do you want to be fit?” I’m convinced that if everyone filled those pages with honest answers they would figure out a way—any way—to get into the shape of their lives, and stay there.

Impossible you say? I think so.Yet every day women ask me how I do it.

“How do you stay fit?”
“How do you stay so young looking?”
“How do you manage a career and motherhood so seemingly effortless?”

There was a time I would have given a very simple and direct answer to those questions. But now that I’m in my forties and have had to actually sustain what I call the Elements of Life, I’ve a better vantage point. And let me tell you, getting it together is not the same as keeping it together. And keeping it together has more to do with being pliable than being perfect. As my husband says, perfection is a myth.

Today’s woman is inundated with the ‘how to’s’ of perfection. Just look at all those screaming headlines on the mags at the supermarket checkout line: How to have the perfect thighs, perfect abs, perfect skin, perfect hair. How to find the perfect man, the perfect workout, the perfect home, the perfect diet. And while a woman’s greatest asset may be her capacity to multitask, is achieving these almost superhuman expectations really possible?

The pressure on a woman to discover and implement everything that can make her life “balanced and perfect” is intense. I don’t know about you, but no matter how much success I’ve had with any of these ‘secrets’ of perfection, one thing is certain: none of it lasted forever. What worked for me in my twenties didn’t necessarily work for me in my thirties. And what worked for me when I was childless sure as heck didn’t work for me with a toddler in the house. Over the years I discovered the harder I tried to cling to all of those “secrets” the more illusive my happiness became. Suddenly my greatest asset had become my greatest liability.

What I have leaned is that life is a growing, breathing thing, as constant as the sea but just as unpredictable. Always moving, always changing. If something in our lives is no longer working, we have to be willing to let it go and apply what I’ve termed the Three R’s: Reassess, Research, Recommit. And we must do so with all the fervor and faith of a new bride. The more willing we are to live lives open to change, growth and discovery, the more moments of perfection we get to experience. With all due respect to my husband, I don’t think perfection is a myth. I think it’s just misunderstood. Perfection is not something we achieve. It is not a destination to arrive at. Perfection is something we move through one moment at a time. We get to discover it again and again.

So how do I do it? My health, beauty and fitness regimens are built around the belief that success in all of these areas requires the consideration of three things: what you are born with, what you put in it and what you put on it. They are, in fact, connected – each one of these programs, these essential Elements of Life, feed each other. So yes, I’ve developed a skin and beauty routine that can have you looking a decade younger; and a fitness and flexibility program that will get you in the best shape of your life. Yes I can recommend a line of amazing nutritional supplements to help add that glow of good health to the entire package. But just as importantly, I have figured out how to spend all day at work, the late afternoon on the football field with my daughter’s team, the early evening surfing with my family and still have a hot meal waiting for us when we get home. Because for me it’s no longer about reaching for the perfect life – it’s about living a life full of perfection.

And that, ladies, is how I do it.

I’m writing this on January 1stwhile flying from San Fransisco to LA. I flew up last night to celebrate the New Year with the hubby, who was up there for work. I love New Years; fresh beginnings, possibilities, hopes. And this year change is definitely in the air. Big change. I can feel it. I’m not sure if it’s a shift of consciousness all around me, or just that I haven’t watched the news in a month. As they say, ignorance is bliss. But I guess it doesn’t much matter why a perspective is, so much as what it is. And with this perspective I feel better. I look better. I’m more joyful, more powerful, more expressive, more excited. My outlook is better and therefore my daily experience is better, more productive even.

So whether this new perspective is due to a lack of awareness of the negative or a greater sense of the positive doesn’t really matter. My perspective isn’t going to change what is. But it definitely affects what will be, perhaps just in my little life, my little world. But in that little world, my life touches some one else’s little life in their little world, who then touches some one else’s little life in their little world and before you know it, our little world has become the world itself.

So if you really stop and examine it, our little lives, our little worlds…that’s what makes the whole world. And it’s the only thing that can make the world whole.

Here’s to a promising year.

So whether this new perspective is due to a lack of awareness of the negative or a greater sense of the positive doesn’t really matter. My perspective isn’t going to change what is. But it definitely affects what will be, perhaps just in my little life, my little world. But in that little world, my life touches some one else’s little life in their little world, who then touches some one else’s little life in their little world and before you know it, our little world has become the world itself.

So if you really stop and examine it, our little lives, our little worlds…that’s what makes the whole world. And it’s the only thing that can make the world whole.

Here’s to a promising year.

Lip Gloss Inspiration- December 6, 2010

It’s Sunday night and I’m flying over the keyboards laughing at my ridiculous weekend. I had a blog to write, Wonderful Wednesdays to create and Inspirational quotes to record for the EOL Soul Starters. But where did I spend my time? At a bake sale, a musical, and following along in a carpool. A full on mom weekend. My friend and Inner Circle pal Noriko was astounded, “ Nia,” she says in her broken English, “ you ah crazy! How you do all this after the week of meetings after meetings after meetings? I didn’t think you would show up. It’s too much!” And yes, it was an awful lot. I mean I literally had about 4 hours to myself in the last 2 days. And I have to admit, there were moments when I thought, “Okay, this is nuts. I have so much work to do. And really all I’m doing here is chauffeuring kids and baby sitting their bake sale.”

But you know what? I’m so glad I stuck there at my Sienna’s side. Why? Just to be there. Did she need me? No. The girl is totally capable on her own. Did she cling to me and engage me every minute? No. Did she discuss the experience with me? Nope. Probably not till later this week. This weekend Sienna had very little to do with me while we were out and about with her little troupe of friends. She spent most of her time engaging with the kids her age. But can I tell you something? As mature and capable as she is, she would run up and just hug on me for 30 seconds, or give me a kiss on the cheek. She would ask me to help her mix her hot chocolate or hand her some lip-gloss. I got to watch her inner act with Dillon and Saku and Misha and Will, playing card tricks and passing out cookies.

For this I missed recording this weeks inspirational Soul Starters for thousands of people? Yep. And I’d do it all over again. Because for me, watching my little Sienna become a young lady, letting her know I’m right there, showing her I’m there at an arms reach rather than a phone call away really counts. It counts huge, in her life and in mine. She may not need me to hold her hand when she crosses the street or give her a bottle when she’s crying out in hunger but today, in this moment, handing her that lip gloss was just as important to both her and to me.

This is our inspiration. This is our Soul Starter. I’ve found inspiration in the most unsuspecting places. But really people…in a pot of lip-gloss? Who’d a thunk it??