I wonder sometimes about my inner dialogues and just how many fucked-up voices there are inside my head.

For example, when work was done yesterday I should have headed straight to the pool for a water aerobics class. But my the voice in my head that helps me make shitty decisions came up with some really compelling arguments to skip the gym and go home to the couch.

• It was overcast and gloomy. Who wants to swim when it’s damp outside?
• The instructor is a creepy retired gym teacher, resulting in flashbacks to the 1970s, where all my troubles with physical fitness began –gym class PTSD.
• The hillbilly family would likely be there, and hillbillies are very hard to drown.
• I swam laps on Sunday and my body still ached from it. Hello, I never said I was Diana Nyad.

Diana Nyad > me

Despite the fact that I know I always feel better after I workout, and my inner optimist tries to rally me on, my inner cynic always coddles me into making bad choices.

It’s like there is a two-party debate continually raging in my brain.  My inner Progressive whispers to get fit and stay positive, but my inner Reactionary always shouts that and makes that sound like a sissy idea from a pansy ass.

Even though I know that’s a completely false, I fall for it almost every time.

It’s all very noisy, the rhetoric is endless and at the end of the day, nothing gets done. Just like Congress.

I am contemplating going to a yoga class today. I like yoga, but with my bad knees it can be tricky. And at my gym, there are mirrors on two of the studio walls that are hard to avoid — if I don’t get one particular spot in the back of the room, I have to stare at myself while trying to do the poses.

And when I watch myself as I practice yoga, it looks a lot like this:

I would like to say it wasn’t as bad as I feared. But I hardly ever get to say what I like.

I spent most of 2008 shedding 50 pounds. It seems that I spent a good portion of 2009 piling 24 of those pounds right back on.

When I finally pried myself out of the fetal position that I curled into, I had to admit to myself that I already knew this to be true. I’ve only been wearing the same two pairs of jeans and one pair of khakis for months because I can’t squeeze my ass into any of my wardrobe full of pants. I can see the fat oozing over the top of my waistband and bulging through my shirts.

But numbers are scary as shit. Numbers bend you over and spank you hard. And not in a fun, kinky way.

And I fretted and I worried and I beat myself up emotionally for failing for the umpteenth time in my life. I ended up with a migraine.

It was so fucking hard to take this weight off in 2008 and I am so disappointed in myself for letting 2009 take me half way back to where I was.

But I abso-fuckin-lutley cannot go back to Weight Watchers. I cannot sit through those ridiculous meetings and I cannot log in every bite of food I eat and I cannot agonize whether I swam enough laps in the morning to earn the estimated points in a slice of birthday cake in the afternoon. Real people don’t live that way and I like to live like a real person.

So I have spent this week doing the best I can to make good food choices. No vending machine treats. No McDonald’s drive thru at lunch. But no tabulating point values for every step I take and every bite I eat.

And I lost two of the 24 pounds.

By deterrents, I really mean stupid excuses. If stupid excuses were currency, I could pay our mortgage with them and have enough left over to get that yacht I always dreamed of. And I’d be sailing it to my private island.

Today’s stupid excuse that almost derailed me: My husband couldn’t find his BlackBerry.

Told you it was stupid.

See, it’s been so long since we’ve been to the gym, that Hoylier couldn’t remember the combination to his locker (this is why I have a key, not a combination lock. And I have several copies of the key because I am awesome at losing things.)

In the span of time since we last actually went to the gym, to which we make a generous donation in the form of our monthly membership dues, Hoylier has acquired a Droid. So his BlackBerry, which is now just for work, has fallen out of favor as the toy du jour. Thus the BlackBerry has become misplaced, most likely in his desk at his office. The locker combination is saved in the now completely uncool BlackBerry.

And he needs the combination to to get his tennis shoes, which have in all likelihood rotted from lack of use languishing in his long-unopened locker. He tells me to just go on without him.

Well, let’s just drive to your office and get your BlackBerry, I suggest.

And that started a whole chain of logical reasons why that was, at best, a shitty proposition, and I finally just said, fine, let’s not go.

Sensing my weakness to just give in and not exercise because my husband has a missing smart phone – which may be the BEST shitty excuse of all time – he took me by the hands, raised me up out of my comfy chair and said, “Oh no, no, no. We’re going.”

He wore another pair of shoes that are comfy for walking and we both did 45 minutes on the treadmill.

This was the breakthrough I think we both needed.

Damn, I’m out of shape. I walked just under 2 miles in 45 minutes and I was sweaty and uncomfortable. And now I’m stiff.

And I am going back tomorrow. With my locker key. And I am eating lettuce for the rest of 2010.

OK, the last part is probably not true. But it feels right. The gym is a helluva appetite suppressant.