Fantastic (home) fitness

So, I used to think that having a home gym was for those people who either a) are too lazy to go to the gym or b) want their guests to think they train so much they have to have their equipment in immediate reach. It turns out, I have been utterly disillusioned, and completely wrong. When you’ve got space for it, having a home gym is probably one of the most practical things I have ever experienced in my entire life - and I’m Norwegian, engaged to a Swede, so I know practicality when I see it. 

The best thing about having a home gym is probably that you don’t have to organise to actually go to the gym - so there’s no “Well, we’ll do it after the groceries,” or “Yeah, let’s drive there before lunch.” No, sirree - you just put on whatever clothes you want to train in (that’s another perk), and walk the two metres from your bedroom to, voila, your training area. Admittedly, it’s neither as big, nor as fancy as a gym, but the actual amount of space you’d spend at a real gym probably isn’t much more than what you can do in a little room at home anyway. Plus, you get all that space to yourself. 

Second favourite of mine is the fact that I can behave exactly as I like in our home gym. Even though that was pretty close to the case at Aqualife too, there’s just something amazing (perhaps particularly being a woman) about being able to groan like the steroid-heads from Predator whenever I’m pushing heavy, or just plain feel like it. I can put my Schwarzenegger face on and grumble as much as I want.

Then, the third best thing about having a home gym is the fact that you can decorate it to your heart’s desire, and play whatever music you want. Our walls are covered in pictures of everything from Dr. Life to Mr. Olympia himself, plus some good motivational quotes for me, my favourite of which is “Skinny girls look good in clothes - Fit girls look good naked.”

Superior to all these things, however, is the fact that I’m getting much better results at home than I was getting at the gym. Ariz noted this a few days ago after a workout session, saying he had started to sense an inkling of actual back muscle on me. I immediately walked into the bathroom, posed in front of the mirror, and tensed my back. And there they were: microscopic little patches of uneven where muscles have slowly started to form. Perhaps groans and moans are the way to go after all. 

Slemani sweetness

So, a couple of months back, you may remember Ariz and I doing a two-week long sugar free experiment. Now, this experience taught me two things:

1. Going without sugar is refreshing for the body, soothing for the mind, and provides a strong sense of accomplishment
2. I have a pretty severe sugar intolerance

I discovered this on the flight from Perth to Dubai, on which I indulged in a yummy Emirates dessert and one soft drink too many. I felt miserable - and not just “Ew, I’m eating sugar again,” but actually “I don’t feel well.” 

As you may have guessed, this latter lesson has been harder to grasp and take on as fact, but it remains just as true no matter how many Daim-chocolates I drool (and practically cry) over here in Kurdistan; when I eat sugar, my body is incredibly unhappy. 

This would have been a fairly easy problem to overcome in Norway or Australia, I thought when we got here, but looked gloomily at the prospect of having to survive in Slemani without any kind of sweets. Two weeks before my birthday, however, Ariz dead-stopped me at the supermarket. He looked like he’d seen a ghost, and I was irritable and anxious to move on, so didn’t really pay attention at first. 

“Synne! Look!” he exclaimed, pointing in utter disbelief at a shelf section of - you never would have guessed it - healthy foods. I mentioned last week how fatty Middle Eastern food is, and make no mistake about it: people’s attitude to food here includes neither nutritional values nor calorie counts. To find this treasure trove was like finding a laptop in Tutankhamun’s tomb. And most unbelievable of all, at the shelf’s bottom left corner, there was Steviola. 

Steviola is a sugar-alcohol product that tastes just like sugar, but contains no glucose, sucrose, fructose, or other sugar kind. In Norway it’s called Sukrin. I couldn’t believe my own eyes, and didn’t actually believe the product was real until I made lemon meringue pie with it for my birthday. In thorough disbelief, I baked the pie base, whisked the meringue, and stirred the lemon cream. Then, as I bit into a completely sugar-free deliciousness the night before the 11th - perfectly balanced in its Steviola sweet and lemon sour - I realised that I had found my life-long sugar substitute. And in Slemani, Kurdistan at that. 

Welcome to Kurdistan

Kurdistan is an eruption of impressions, cultural differences, flavours, and sights I hadn’t prepared myself for in any way. In the midst of relocating to a different continent, and the chaos that ensues (every time, I believe), we’ve tried to maintain the two things we both need to stay stable, sane, and strong: going to the gym and eating healthy. 

The former of the two was easily solved when we found a supermarket down the road from our apartment that sells training equipment. About a week and a half ago, we bought a treadmill, a bench press, and a few weights for a quarter of any Western price I’ve ever seen, and man, oh, man, was I thrilled. Running again, after nearly two weeks of no exercise at all, has been marvellous, and on my birthday five days ago, I got a brand new pair of running shoes. The Adidas shop on Salem street is neither licensed, nor as fancy as any European running shoe store - but they had a pair that fit me, and fit me well.

“They take in the stuff that’s made for the Indonesian market,” Ariz translated to me as I tried on the neon pink and black running shoes, “so it’s like - second-grade Adidas.” We both laughed, I skipped around the shop in the wonderful things, and paid the $60 they cost. I’ve run every day since then.

Second on our list of health and sanity, there’s food. Anyone who’s ever had a kebab, a falafel, or any other typically Middle Eastern dish will know that one ingredient brings them all together, and that, my friends, is fat. When we first came here, it felt as if my love handles grew by the minute, and everything that was put in front of us had a fat content higher than McDonald’s put together. So we’ve done what we did in Australia: we buy the ingredients in the wonderfully smelly and magical bazaar, and cook our delicious, wholesome food at home. I’m not giving up the samosas they have here, though - those things are delicious.

All in all, we’re slowly coming back into routine. I’m starting to think of our home gym as our actual gym, and my longing for the fancy machinery at Aqualife is starting to fade. And when Ariz puts delicious dishes like his chilli con carne in front of me for dinner, it’s hard not to feel like I’m at home.