The Laughing Cow

The Laughing Cow – Post 1

21 July 2010 by Sophie

This is sponsored content from BlogHer and The Laughing Cow.

Last spring I was reading a friend’s blog and noticed that she’d issued a challenge to her readers: 30 Days of Jillian Michaels’ 30 Day Shred. I was intrigued. I was also – dare I say it – inspired. And for reasons I have yet to fully understand, I immediately thought, “Okay. I’m in.” AND I SIGNED UP FOR IT.

CLEARLY SOME FITNESS-MINDED ALIENS SEIZED CONTROL OF MY MIND.

So I drove to the Target and bought the DVD and decided that the very next day would be Day One.

OH MY MERCIFUL HEAVENS.

But in a delightfully unexpected turn of events, I found out that my friend Melanie had also committed to the challenge. I cannot overstate the importance of this discovery because HELLO, ACCOUNTABILITY, NICE TO SEE YOU. We also realized that we were both planning to set aside some time to “shred” in the afternoons, but we were sort of blase’ about it because the workout only lasts 20 minutes, and how hard could that be, right? I mean, I can do all sorts of things for 20 minutes: I can lift the fried chicken off of my plate and put it into my mouth, I can repeatedly mash the buttons on the TV remote, and I can also send and receive countless text messages while continually sipping an ice cold diet Coke.

You may be picking up on why the aliens seized control of my mind and convinced me to sign up for the challenge in the first place.

So on that fateful spring afternoon, when there was not another living soul in my house, I turned on the DVD and got ready to feel the burn. I even wore my brand new lavender leotard and hot pink leg warmers.

Oh, I kid because there was a time when I really did own a lavender leotard and hot pink leg warmers.

I will spare you all the details of my initial foray into shredding, but suffice to say that within the first five minutes of the workout I was thinking Not Nice Things about Jillian and her perky fitness compadres. It didn’t help that Anita – who was quickly becoming my new BFF since she was in charge of showing us the “modified” moves, aka The Moves For Those Of You Whose Primary Form Of Exercise Has Been Pointing Your Toes While Typing – had abs so defined that I thought at first they must surely be the creation of some subtle airbrushing, only to realize that OH, those abs are totally real, and MY WORD, they are spectacular.

However, I moved past my bitterness, soldiered through the workout (does it tell you something that I was actually relieved when it was time for the ab segments because that meant I got to LIE ON THE FLOOR?), and y’all, when those twenty minutes were over, my leg muscles were so exhausted that my very first thought was I’ll never walk normally again.

Sure enough, I spent the next forty-five minutes trying to figure out how I was going to walk without looking like some straight-from-the-boondocks contestant on America’s Next Top Model who is trying to impress Tyra with what she thinks is a fierce runway walk. The only way I could manage to keep my knees from locking up was to lift my the tops of my legs to a forty-five degree angle with my waist, then sort of kick out my leg until my foot hit the floor, and later, when Melanie and I were laughing until we cried about The Day Jillian Nearly Killed Us, I described my new walk as something along the lines of what you’d expect from a demented clydesdale.

In other words: it was very sexy and now.

And since I had absolutely no hope of being mobile for day two of The Shred since WHOA, NELLIE, LEGS WERE A-SMARTIN’, I figured that maybe I could track down some sort of beige marker and spend my twenty minutes watching Jillian tell me to WORK HARDER and PUNCH IT OUT while I drew ab muscles on my stomach in an attempt to replicate Anita’s rockin’ six-pack.

Certainly I was climbing to new heights of fitness!

Or at least I would have been.

If only I had been able to, you know, stand up.

So.

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