Health and fiscal well-being: You Fail It!

So I am fat. Not fat like most people are fat, but uniquely fat, in that my arms, legs, chest, back, thighs, buttocks, neck, and face don't show it, but my belly is massive and spherical. I weigh 180 lbs, where my high-school slightly paunchy weight was 160-165, and my gaunt vegetarian weight was 145.

So what we're trying to do about Problem #1 is to join a gym, and go. I've done the first part pretty well. It's just going that's hard. I target going 3 times a week for 30 minutes each. When I go, I just hop on the cross-country skiing machine and tell it to "fat burn" – this keeps my heart rate at around 122 bpm, and cranks the resistance up or down to hold that same heart rate. It's not really particularly brutal or anything, and when I'm done the machine says I've used around 350 calories.

All in all, easy enough, except I don't go. Here are the excuses that I can remember that I've used:

• Website is down, I can't tell if gym is closed or not.
• I'm sick
• Bead emergency, have to fix something on ebay software.

I have already missed my first scheduled "go" this week – yesterday I used the first excuse up there. I have to do a make-up today, then my regular goes on Wed and Fri – or else I'm going to try another tactic.

Since I can't seem to make it to the gym three times for half an hour each, maybe I can make it twice at 45 minutes? And if even that doesn't work, I can try one mammoth "go" at 1-1/2 hour. According to my research, the first is better than the second, and second better than the third, but it also says that you need to do at least 700 calories of work for it to have any effect. And that's an old-person target, I'm not yet that ancient. So I should be doing 1000 or so calories, at minimum.

Regardless of any numeric hand-waving, my weight has remained constant during my 2 months of gym membership – so this week is the final chance to stick with a normal schedule before I have to switch over to one of the crappier ones I have there.