Today, I’m going to describe an unusual experience that occurred during my non-work life.

To do that I have to make an announcement.

I’ve given up on spinning.

Don’t worry. That doesn’t mean the blog is over. It just means that once I realized what the non-groupon price was per month at the spinning gym, I knew I didn’t want to become a member. For that price I could join a real gym…

So, I mustered up all of my courage (which has been greatly bolstered by the comments I have gotten from people here), and I joined a Golds Gym. Don’t worry, it has spin classes too–so I will likely have more follies and foibles to report later.

Gyms terrify me. They always have. If school had been about physical fitness and not mental fitness I would have ridden the short bus.

To help get over my fear, I enlisted a personal trainer. Something that wound up being more expensive than the spin gym, but I rationalized would help me learn to exercise “the right way” and without injury. Over time I will hopefully build the knowledge I need to go it alone and lose the shame.

Yesterday morning at 5am (yes, I’m still bonkers and getting up before dawn to exercise), I had my first real session with the trainer. Before we got started with the session, I had to get measured. Not with a tape measure and scale. Oh no–we are in the digital age, and tools for body shaming are way more advanced than that. We now have 3D body scans.

If you haven’t ever seen this, let me describe it for you. I was instructed to strip down to my sports bra and stand on a circular raised platform (luckily the trainer left the room so I didn’t have an audience for this). Once I got on the platform it began to spin. It took about 30 seconds to rotate before it dinged and told me to get off.

So there I was, more naked than I felt comfortable with at 5am in a foreign environment. I was rotating on a pedestal like some flabby carshow goddess while a machine took an insane amount of pictures so it could build a 3D model of my flab-u-locity.

I felt a little like this until I saw the pictures:

But in the end the 3D model looked a little more like this:

Okay–maybe I wasn’t being super sassy and wearing heals, a bikini, a visor, shades, and hoop earrings for the scan–but otherwise these pictures are eerily reminiscent of what I was shown.

What kind of cruel, crazy, futuristic world are we living in?

After the trauma of the 3D modeling of my body was over, I started my first workout with the trainer. She was part coach, part physical therapist, and part therapist. Just the combo this Fat Geriatrician needs.

And as I was walking out to go home, I ran into an woman in her 80s walking in. I must have looked like a safe friendly face, because we chatted for several minutes. She is there every morning. If she can do this, I can do this.

I think I’ll be going back tomorrow morning.