Don't Be a Bonnie

I don't know if any of y'all watch Biggest Loser, but I'd like to spend a moment today talking about a contestant who showed her true colors last night.

Bonnie is the oldest person on the ranch at this point.  She's a grandma from, I think, Boston.  Like all contestants, she's grossly overweight.  Like a large number of the obese, her knees are fucked from carrying all that extra weight all those years.  Unlike a lot of contestants, she uses this as an excuse for not exercising as hard as she could be.

And given the fact that my leg is often fucked, I can vouch for that fact that it's a good excuse - especially when they're doing exercises that work the legs.

Except last night her trainer - former tennis star Anna Kournikova - had the two remaining members of the blue team working out in the pool.  A workout that pretty much cuts out the whole "I've got bad knees' reasoning.

You see, in the pool, the excuses float away (pardon the pun).  She couldn't do a half-shit job and blame it on her knees.  She had to work.  And Anna pushed her harder because she knew the knee problems were no longer a factor. 

Of course, that's when the claws came out.  Suddenly, Anna was picking on her.  Anna was playing favorites.  It was all Anna's fault - and btw, Bonnie never liked Anna anyway, so there.  It couldn't have been that Becky (the other Blue Team member) was getting more praise because she was busting her ass.  Nope. 

What really pissed me off is that Bonnie thought she deserved as much praise as Becky without bothering to put in as much effort*.  And the scale last night proved who was doing the work.  Bonnie lost 4 lbs.  Becky lost 8. 

Bonnie's answer?  Well, of course, Becky can do it.  She's 13 years younger.  I'm guessing if someone asked Bonnie why Mike (the last blue team member to get voted off - who was only a year younger) lost so much weight every week when she didn't, she'd say it was because he was a man. 

My point is, there's always some excuse we can throw out there for why we're not succeeding.  Sometimes, it really is out of our hands.  There's one gal on the black team who's doing this with a stress fracture, for instance.  (Except she's still losing the weight and not bitching about how hard Bob pushes her.)  Life comes and screws with our plans, and there ain't a damn thing we can do about it.  We get sick, or our kids get sick. There are power outages and PTA meetings, computer crashes and financial difficulties.  There's flood, famine and plague. 

Most of the time, though, our excuses are exactly that - EXCUSES.

Don't be a Bonnie.  Don't let anything stand in the way of succeeding at what you really want to do.  Because if you let your excuses pile up, you'll never achieve your goals.


*Don't get me started on that one, or we'll be here all week.