November 2011

Are “Ladies Who Workout” the New “Ladies Who Lunch”?

November 30, 2011

If a picture says 1,000 words, then this one of Sophia Loren lunching with Jayne Mansfield says about 5,000 I think. Women of a certain age and station who get together at expensive venues to gossip, compliment each other’s clothes and vent about their children are a comedic staple from Saturday Night Live to John Stewart. They are the bourgeoisie! They wear adorable little hats! They are the 1%! They are… us? Well this is awkward. As I sat on the stretching mats this morning after a killer workout with the Gym Buddies (we have discovered the salutary effects of [...]

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Preventative Health Care: Is being “not sick” the same as being “healthy”?

November 29, 2011

YES IT WILL. At least that’s what I keep telling myself. Don’t disillusion me. Remember that kid in your class who ate dirt or licked the inside of the freezer or sucked down paste? Well it turns out that he may not have been one pinto bean shy of a bingo like we all thought. Pica – the intense desire to eat non-food items – is now thought to be the result of an iron or other mineral deficiency. Who knew? Get the kid a steak and he might have been class president. Or maybe his blood was fine and [...]

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A Man Died At My Gym Today

November 28, 2011

A man died at my gym today. In the space between one breath and the next, his heart flailed. Then failed. Slumped to the floor, his next breath came not from within him but from without. An unnatural gift from a stranger. A gift that was not quite enough. He died shirtless, vulnerable and alone. Alone save for the strangers pumping his chest and the strangers – me – watching from the balcony above and the strangers staring from the entrance. A Greek chorus to witness a tragedy. This is not the first time I have seen someone die. Not [...]

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Breaking the Scale Obsession (So I can become obsessed with other things like geeky TV)

November 27, 2011

Fever dream or best idea ever for a Great Fitness Experiment? Admit it: she’s getting an awesome workout. (Click through to see the above video if it doesn’t show up in your e-mail or reader.) Lying feverish and delusional in bed makes you think funny things. At first it was just stuff like “Can I be totally sweat-soaked and still be freezing?” and “I wonder if that noise means the children have emptied every cereal box in the house into a big pile and are jumping into it like leaves?” Answers: sadly, yes and even more sadly, yes. But as [...]

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Too sick. Can’t blog.

November 22, 2011

Am laying feverish in bed. Upside: fever dreams are trippy. Downside: I look like the saddest homeless lady ever in tights, sweat pants, long sleeved shirt, house dress (oh yes I am), sweatshirt over that, hood up, fuzzy socks on and buried under 3 quilts. Still not warm. Commence feeling bad for me. ‘Night. And Happy Thanksgiving (or Thursday, depending on where you live) if I’m still delusional by then.

From Oscar-Seeking Stars to Empathetic Personal Trainers: What happens when people try to gain weight?

November 21, 2011

When super-fit personal trainer Drew Manning decided to “get fat” for six months and then lose the weight, chronicling his journey on his website Fit2Fat2Fit, his story shot into the media limelight faster than a starlet’s nip slip. Everyone, it seems, wants to know why Manning would voluntarily shed his rock-hard body – one he’d used to model in the past – and trade in his thin privilege for something most Americans are doing their darndest to get rid of? He explains, “My goal is to inspire people to get fit, teach them how to do it and give them [...]

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Muscle Soreness: Busting the “No Pain No Gain” Myth

November 20, 2011

Pretty sure this is about to be “bad sore.” Great news: After about a year of stagnation I broke my deadlift personal record! By a lot! While this was awesome and made me strut around like Ashton Kutcher in a sorority house, two problems became immediately apparent: 1. I did a whole set at my new weight which means, as Gym Buddy Krista put it, “Clearly you haven’t been pushing yourself! If we’d known you had that in you… Never again will we let you get away with a wussy deadlift.” (Side note: for some reason the deadlift has always [...]

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The 3 Things I Wanted To Change About Myself As a Child [Fun & Fit radio interview]

November 17, 2011

As a child there were 3 things I desperately wanted to change about myself, Anne Shirley-style: I wanted red hair – something I did eventually achieve thanks to every shade of red hair dye in existence until I realized halfway through college that I look really bad as a redhead. My skin has pink undertones and when I have red hair I just look like a hot mess. I wanted to be skinnier – sad but true fact: In my diary written by my 8-year-old self was a list of “Everything I Must Do Before Bed !!!!!” and it [...]

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Truth or Slander: Can you judge a skinny girl by her picture?

November 16, 2011

BIG SOULLESS MEDIA takes on TINY BUT MORAL BLOGGER! It’s the stuff movies are made of! No? Ok, so I don’t really watch movies but it’s a story we’re all familiar with and if you are a blogger yourself, you probably already know where this is going. There has been a bit of a legal kerfuffle going on behind the scenes here at The Great Fitness Experiment. You wouldn’t know it unless you are a reader unfortunate enough to have subscribed to the comments of the afflicted post and/or you have ended up on the receiving end of one [...]

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Do They Have Scary Clowns in Heaven?

November 15, 2011

My husband and I went as Aragorn and Arwen for Halloween this year (geek test: If you just said “Who???” then you are officially not a geek). Like my headband of sliver flowers embedded with red plastic stones? Yep, Nana’s. Granny panties, size XL, beige, used. They’d arrived in a plain brown envelope accompanied by a single tea towel dated to the ’70′s by the brown mushrooms that covered it. This was hardly what a girl dreams of getting for her all-important 12th birthday and yet there it was. But the worst part wasn’t the suspicious stains (30-year-old coffee grounds or [...]

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