[We present this program as a Pesach service - if you begin
now and follow up studiously, in six months time you will not
HAVE to do the window shades, bathroom tiles, doors, closet
doors, cobwebs on high places, and all those things you are
annually told do NOT constitute Pesach cleaning. Read on.]
Debra Waterhouse, an American health professional, describes
aerobic exercise as any activity that raises your heart rate.
She claims you need to do this for one hour, four times a
week. She says, "Aerobic exercise removes the fat from your
fat cells and releases it into your bloodstream, where it is
transported to your muscles and burned." Further, she
suggests that you swim, bike, jog or walk, starting with ten
or fifteen minutes at a time, and work your way up to an
hour.
Let's try to translate this into our hectic, Shabbos and
Yomtov oriented lifestyle. Some of us find time to walk a bit
in the evening and some even manage a regular swimming
schedule. I know that I don't. But if aerobics can be any
activity that increases the heart rate and burns up fat, why
can't I put on some energetic music and scrub, lift, shake
and vacuum my way through an activity and get the same
benefits? [One of the first ground rules should be to take
the phone off the hook, so as to work up uninterruptedly to a
fast pace. The second, not to slack off in energy.]
I organized my personal program by referring to my Pesach
cleaning house map. This is a layout of my apartment on a
large piece of graph paper. It doesn't have to be perfectly
accurate since we are not trying to be architects or
builders. We are trying to build a healthier person and the
architectural looking plan only serves to have a place to
write down all the things in each room that need to be
cleaned, polished, straightened up and sorted through. You
must write down every detail. That means that you sit in the
room with this graph paper (let's start with a master
bedroom) and write: light fixture -- dust, window glass --
polish, linens -- change, outside doors of closet -- spray
and wipe, and so on until every item is listed and its
cleaning chore defined.
After all the rooms have been catalogued, the next job is to
estimate the smallest time increment for each task.
Windows might be five minutes and closet doors fifteen.
Eliminate sorting and other sedentary jobs from your aerobics
program. After all, whom are you kidding? The object is to
strain yourself a little at a time and work up to an hour of
fast-paced, hard labor four times a week, just like in a
professional gymnasium. Think how much a hard working
housemaid could accomplish in that amount of time. And at
what price?
You may allow yourself hours (minutes) of points for the
floor-wash and the linen-change that you've been doing all
along. That should give you a good start in the program right
away. You see, you've already begun!
As you reach and stretch to clean the outside of the top
kitchen cabinets, concentrate on pulling in the stomach
muscles that got stretched out like old rubber bands from
years ago. I once paid membership in a health club for the
use of an exercise machine that was designed to stretch me
this way and that while lying on a comfortable leather bed.
It was luxurious, and effective, and expensive. I lost about
five millimeters at waist level in a short time, only to gain
it promptly back shortly after I left the program. The
housecleaning aerobics is cost-free, even cost-saving, and
you never have to quit once you get into the habit of
cleaning in small increments on a regular schedule. And
working quickly, you will see how much more you can get done.
You can even work on increasing the pace as you progress.
If you are a very organized person, you may want to arrange
your map into a more rigid form, listing when to do each
chore and how often. I, myself, just look around the house
and at the chart and decide what I'm in the mood to tackle.
One day, I might resolve to attack a small tiled area in the
bathroom with my personal concoction of Fantastic, citric
acid and water and an old toothbrush. Cleaning the tiles and
the grout in between can be a fifteen minute workout. A
larger area as time goes by can be a good hour's labor.
Another small exercise can be to clean one door to a room on
the outside, including the molding around it. Scrub
energetically with scotch-brite and liquid cleaner, wipe with
a damp rag and dry with an old towel. Don't miss the tops of
the door and over the molding, and, of course, shine up the
handle. Do only one door at a time. If you do one a week,
your house will look sparkling all year round.
Every other week, I clean either the upper or the lower
kitchen cabinets on the outside and inside doors. The inner
cabinets are a separate chore and should be done one at a
time. Getting on and off the chair with dishes and cans has
to be as good exercise as the stair machine in the health
club and you can buy yourself a present with the money you've
saved.
When I want to extend my aerobics program to the outside, I
pick a destination that's difficult, but not impossible. I
can walk to my daughter's apartment and up the stairs to the
top floor in about fifteen minutes. That really gets the
heart rate moving and I think about all the fat burning as I
drop into the nearest chair. Sometimes, I make a conscious
decision to walk the twenty minutes to the supermarket for
milk and bread, instead of going into the grocery by the
house. After cooling off in the store and window shopping for
relaxation, I carry the small purchase home. It would be a
mistake to try to shlep botles of soda or anything heavy. The
program will fail if you overdo before your system is
ready.
My Jewish Housewife's Aerobics Program should accomplish two
very important goals. One is a better, healthier, trimmer
`you', and the other is an efficiently run, sparkling clean
home for your family.
