Listen, it’s eating season. We are in the depths of winter, maybe even the most bleak month of the year, and there isn’t much to do. The holidays came and went, but the feasting won’t truly be over until Easter with the arrival of carrot and coconut cake season. For now it’s Valentine’s season and it’s all very sweet and heavy. This week I made tiramisu, a household favorite but, my god, the calories.
We’re talking about five egg yolks, mascarpone cheese, heavy cream - plus those stupid ladyfingers.
All of this is to say - I’m battling weight gain. My hormone replacement therapy basically means that I am perimenopausal in my mid-thirties. This also means it is WAY harder to shift my weight than it used to be.
For my entire life, I was trim. Even when I thought I was big, I was still trim (hindsight is cool, my body image is not healthy). Now if I have three meals in a day and I’ll gain about a pound a week. My menopause doctor said, “well, you just have to count every calorie” and I want to scream GO FUCK YOURSELF to her, but I won’t (she’s literally world class).
I haven’t been an exerciser in my adult life, probably because I was already skinny. What was the point? A few years ago I found yoga and it was really good for my mental health. At the beginning of last year I found cycling. Peloton in particular.
More than anything in the beginning, it was the music that jazzed me up. Cody makes me laugh, Kendall plays metal (increasingly the same songs), some of them are meatheads, some are actual insane people. There’s so much to choose from beyond just cycling. My bookmarks are overrun.
Friends who have Peloton will also be familiar with the constant conversation that it provides. Is Cody paid enough since he is literally CARRYING the platform? Is Rebecca Kennedy going to accidentally kill Andy Speer in a bout of sexual violence? What more can Alex Toussaint really want from me? Will Olivia end us all?
And you know what? It’s been fun. It’s been really fun. really fun. Or it was, until about a month ago. Peloton keeps bringing in new instructors, series, catchphrases and the brand itself is dying. I can only listen to Kendall tell me to reach within and blahblah so many times before it’s completely hollow. I’m even tired of Cody (a bit).
It’s been expected that Peloton would start to face a decline while the pandemic shifts. As Covid reaches endemic status and the world opens up, we are not all trapped in our basement on the bike for a thirty minute fucking BREAK from our families. Peloton’s stock has faced a steep decline in stock prices and recently laid off nearly 3000 employees (in their severance package they get a free year subscription of their former employer’s platform, poor things).
And I’ve been using it less and less. I think now I’m down to once or twice weekly. I’m not captivated the way I once was. I don’t really care to gossip about it anymore. Yoga with friends on the app is all well and good, but we can do that in person now. It feels like everyone slowly stopped turning up. It’s Denis-style boring.
So, I’m bargaining. I’ll have fewer meals so I look just as good with my clothes off and I’ll still use the bike, but I won’t like it as much as I did. I’m just in it for the tiramisu.