Hi, I'm Monica Packer, and you're listening to About Progress, where we are about

progress made practical. Do you struggle getting to the gym? Do you find it hard to carve out the

extra time and money that requires? Not to mention the logistic gymnastics with family and home life.

You are not alone. One of the most common habits women come to me wanting to work on is exercise.

And the reasons abound on why it's so important to them, but also why it's so difficult for them to

prioritize, from having a newborn baby to having a new chronic health problem, to having many

varied responsibilities that are stretching them far too thin, to even the difficulties of

finding good child care at a gym. I am not immune to these struggles.

I have them too.

I think about after my last baby was born and it being a few months in and him starting

to do a little bit better about napping, but not really.

And I was finally ready to do more than my 10 minutes of stretching and yoga for my

baseline.

And I pulled up a very easy, in quotes, 20 minute workout video that I thought would be very doable. Well, it took me three

and a half hours to do 14 minutes of my 20 minute workout video. Why? Because I kept getting interrupted.

The baby woke up not once, but twice,

also interspersed with the pest control, letting me know they were coming, so I had to stop everything and hurry and tidy certain spots that I wanted them to be in just so they could

reach the floor in order to spray those areas, and then them coming and me talking to them.

And by the time I finally threw in

the towel, I just felt really overwhelmed and also defeated. The fact that it took three and a half

hours to do 14 minutes of an easy workout, why even try? If you can relate to that, then I hope you can also relate to the Instagram series

I've been doing on my stories of me showing my workout first thing in the morning. Now, I share those

...