there will be treats

I went to Redbox to get a movie for date night, in fact I got the movie Date Night for date night and I decided to let the dogs ride up to the corner with me. Its in front of 7-11 and I parked directly in front of the the box and instructed Sadie and Max on protocol "wait right here and Mum will be right back" They seem satisfied with that statement, trips to 7-11 are nothing new but typically they're with Dad.

As I made my selection I saw one of the homeless beggars who frequents the corner on the main road out of our intersection round the side of the building and head straight for me. I knew what was coming. The request for spare change so he could get a something to eat (beer) and a cold drink (beer). I have been warned by several of the cops I know in our neighborhood to use caution because most of them are meth addicts who look for "opportunity" to steal.

I heard Max let out a growl and I thought (good boy) but as I looked up from the corner of my eye I noticed the homeless man had stopped in his tracks. I looked down by my side and there was Sadie standing guard beside me flashing her great big teeth and looking like a tough dog. This is so not Sadie. Sadie is the one who does the warning bark and runs away, Max is the one who stands between me and trouble. She had jumped from the Jeep window to protect her MUM! Just about then she let out her "big dog" bark to let him know she meant business and he decided to take a detour around us through the parking lot.

Was I in danger. Not in front of a well lit 7-11. But my doggies know who buys the biscuits! Yes there were treats as soon as we got home.

The Trick to Tabata Workouts [Bring a Barf Bag]

This is one way to ensure you are running at maximal ability. Not that I recommend it.

20 seconds of work followed by 10 seconds of rest. That's one Tabata interval or "Tabata" if you're in the gym and want to sound like all the cool kids. Sounds simple, right? This little gem, a staple of most of the hardest workouts around, revolutionized - some say even began - the fitness frenzy surrounding high intensity interval training or "HIIT." (To prove you're both hip and culturally relevant, feel free to tell your workout partner to "HIIT me baby, one more time!" Bonus points if you do the hair-flippy move. Extra bonus points if your partner replies, "Ok, Bit-Bit!"(Double parenthetical: Have you seen that video lately? She was such an earnest little singer! And, also, there's no way she hasn't had a boob job.))

Why Tabatas?
So how could something so simple be so revolutionary? According to the research, first started by Tabata himself on elite Japanese athletes, doing as little as four minutes (or 8 Tabatas) can increase your aerobic capacity, anaerobic capacity, VO2 max, resting metabolic rate, burn more fat (and make you look 200% crazier) not only as good as, but better than, a traditional 60 minute aerobic workout. That's right - 4 minutes of Tabatas can get you better fitness gains than a whole hour of running on the treadmill.

How To Do Tabatas
So why isn't everyone doing them? Well I said it was simple but I never said it was easy. In fact, if it is easy then you're doing it wrong. Those 20 seconds of rest are balls-to-the-wall* all out 100% effort. You should see stars. Your heart should be trying to claw a hole in your chest cavity to get out. You should be able to play Rorshach in the ginormous puddle of sweat surrounding your machine. You might even see a light and a long tunnel (don't worry, you're not dying it's just the flashlight thingy the medics are shining in your eyes to check for a concussion after you passed out and hit your head on the treadmill handlebars.) You know those RPE (rate of perceived exertion) charts on the wall of every gym? During Tabatas, you should be a 10+. Barftastic!

Contrary to popular belief, you do not have to be a runner to do Tabatas. Any aerobic activity - biking, swimming, jump roping, boxing, squatting, Matrix-style building jumping - can be adapted to a Tabata interval. Although for beginners, running is probably the simplest way to start. For myself, the best (read: hardest) Tabatas I've ever done were punching Sensei Don during Karate class. Yeah, yeah, he was holding pads up. (I split my knuckles wide open on 'em and he still made me finish! I have never been so proud of workout wounds.) Incidentally, the very first Great Fitness Experiment I ever ran - over 3 years ago - was Tabata intervals for twenty horrible minutes on the stationary bike. To this day, the Gym Buddies and I do them about once a week.

To do a running Tabata, all you need is a track or a treadmill. If you are on the track, simply run at full speed for 20 seconds, stop and suck wind like you're the only windmill keeping South Dakota on the grid for 10 insanely short seconds, and then repeat 7 more times. If you are on the tready, power that baby up until it sounds like a jet ready for takeoff. The Gym Buddies and I do max speed but just do whatever you think is the fastest you can run. It will look scary and too fast but you'll be fine once you jump on, I promise. (Or you'll fall off. I've done that too. You'll still be fine, albeit a tad rug-burned.) Jump on and run for 20 seconds. Straddle the belt and hoover in some air for 10 seconds. Repeat 7 times.

The Trick
The trick to a good Tabata workout is this: a good timer. You cannot estimate when 20 seconds and 10 seconds have passed. I promise you. No matter how good you think you are 1-mississippi-ing, your brain will be so fuzzy that you will need help. If you are running on a treadmill you can use the clock on the display - just make sure you start on a 0 or you'll have to do math and sprint at the same time which adds a level of difficulty not even Einstein would want.

If you're not on a treadmill though, timing is hard. There is an iPhone app for it (if there's a "Pocket Girlfriend" app, of course there's a Tabata timer!) but who wants to hold their phone in their sweaty hand while they're sprinting so hard that blackness is overtaking their vision thereby making it highly likely they will crash into something (a real girlfriend, maybe?)? You can download a "Tabata song" onto your iPod that just beeps repetitively for half an hour but then you can't listen to your music while you do it. You can also program your watch to beep in intervals but if you can figure out how to do that then you're smarter than me and my computer science degree put together. (Ok, not that that's hard - I'm a ridiculously bad programmer.)

The easiest way I've found is to just get a simple gym timer. Gymboss sent me one of theirs to try out for free and I really liked it. Its only purpose in life is to be an interval timer. No worries about deleting your podcast or resetting your lap count or accidentally changing your ring tone to *beep* 20 seconds *beep* 10 seconds. You can set it to any interval you'd like and it also has a vibrate option if you prefer to be discreet with your Tabata-lovin'.

Any of you love (to hate) Tabatas like I do? How do you time yours? Are you the kind of person who prefers short super-intense workouts or would you rather run at a steady pace for 60 minutes than endure a HIIT? Anyone else ever fallen off the treadmill??

*All these years I've been saying this, I have thought it had something to do with running balls - as in basketballs, kickballs, whatever-balls - to the wall in some kind of mad speed drill. But having just typed that out I think it may perhaps have a cruder meaning? Although I can't imagine what those balls would have to do with walls and running. Please don't disillusion me. Update: Chelsey educated me in the comments, "I believe that "balls to the wall" is actually an aviation metaphor. That stick that they push forward to make the plane go faster has a ball on top of it and when it's pushed "to the wall" you are going all out." So both my innocent and dirty thoughts were wrong! Buwhahahah!

Have You Ever Hid a Healthy Habit?

Best hiding place ever! My kids would never find me in here!!

My house is a veritable treasure trove of hidden goodies. There are birthday presents stashed at the top of my closet, lingerie under the bed, dark chocolate peanut butter cups in the freezer (bonus: takes me longer to eat them that way. un-bonus: I have to pass by the cookie dough on the way to them.) and our emergency flashlight that my husband and I have hid and re-hid so many times that we don't even know where it is anymore. Obviously, my squirrel tendencies are because I live with 4 little people who have zero concept of respecting other people's belongings. Seriously, they think my panty liners are huge awesome stickers and no matter how many times I hide those suckers I still find them stuck all over the house.

But when it comes to food, I can't really blame the kiddos. In the past I've had some admittedly bizarre behaviors around food (behaviors that I have made a LOT of progress in fixing as of late - wahoo!). I hated eating in front of people. And yet I couldn't eat alone either. I destroyed food. I lied about it. I even hated it. And I hid it. While my food-hiding tendencies run more towards eating abstemiously in public and then shoveling in a half gallon of ice cream at home alone, a comment left on my post "The Slow Metabolism: Fact or Myth?" made me see food-hiding in a totally new perspective. Sometimes I get so caught up in my own neuroses that I forget other people have their own closeted crazies.

Jessica wrote, "I'm not sure I buy the whole 'some people can eat whatever they want and never gain weight' thing. There have been points in my life when I felt like I could eat whatever I wanted, and points where I've felt so obsessed with food that I was never going to win. Maybe there are a couple of people in the world who really can eat thousands and thousands of calories a day, but I think they're extremely rare. I think if you look more closely at those people who seem to be eating junk all the time, you'll find that the numbers add up-- they are not actually eating as many calories in a day as you think they are. If you're thin and don't have much stress around food, it's easier to only eat when you're hungry, and that cuts out a lot of calories. Also, people love to make it look effortless, because it makes them feel special and important, which means they're eating the candy in front of you and hiding the turkey on whole wheat. " [emphasis mine.]

I have this problem: I always think that people have always been the way that I know them now. For instance, when I meet someone new who is very thin it never occurs to me that they might have been heavy in the past or are recovering from a long illness or work very very hard for that tiny body. I just assume that they have always been thin and that it is easy for them. Weird, right? So when I see some skinny girl chowing down on the pie and ice cream, I think "Huh, she's really lucky. She must be one of those who can eat whatever she wants." And then I try not to roll up into a ball of shame and jealousy.

But Jessica makes an excellent point. Of course people are not always as they appear to be. This was brought home to me the other day when I walked into a lady's room to change Jelly Bean's diaper. A young, beautiful mother sat nursing her baby (it was one of those fancy lady's rooms with rocking chairs and plush couches and artwork! Oh yes men, those bathrooms really exist!) and we chatted a bit about our kids who were almost the same age. As I threw away the diaper - in a pail much nicer than the one I have at home, sigh - she suddenly stood up and the distressed look on her face surprised me. "I know this is really weird but I just have to ask you this before you leave?" I blinked. If she was going to try to sell me Amway or Quixstar or whatever it is now, I was ready to bolt. "How did you do it? You're so thin. I mean, you look like you've never even had kids." I turned 7 shades of red and stammered something about my last 10 pounds still hanging around. "No," she said more insistently, "I really really want to know. Did you do a diet? A workout? Pills??" My eyes widened as I contemplated explaining to her my brand of crazy. "I'm desperate," she added as if the tears filling her eyes didn't explain that well enough.

"Well yeah, I do eat healthy most of the time. And I workout." I thought about just leaving it at that - it is true, after all - but then I realized I'd be leaving her with the impression that I've always been this way and that it is easy for me, both of which are so laughably untrue that I plopped my butt down on the couch next to her, gave her a hug and proceeded to tell her my whole sorry story. Four different kinds of eating disorders, my Very Bad Boyfriend, my gymnastics team, my 6th grade health teacher, my bulimic grandmother - the whole shebang. We spoke for about 45 minutes during which I learned that she had been hospitalized with an eating disorder before she'd had her daughter and was now really struggling with the way motherhood had changed her body. By the time we parted I think she felt a lot better and I was immensely glad I had resisted the urge to let her believe I was what she assumed me to be. Sure I obliterated my "perfect" image but that conversation was so healing for both of us that I don't regret my honesty one little bit.

So whether it's hiding the fact that you eat healthy food 90% of the time so you can eat hamburgers and fries when you're in front of people, like Jessica pointed out, or whether it's hiding how much you workout, like I was tempted to do - I want to know, have you ever hid a healthy habit? What made you do it - were you afraid of being called a health nut? Afraid of being labeled as eating disordered (whether you were or not)? Were you just trying to avoid a slew of unwanted advice (You're a vegetarian?! You're going to die from a protein deficiency!!)? Are you ever tempted to just let others think you have it all together?

"Truthiness" in Advertising

You already know that many starlets grace (is grace really the word I'm looking for here?) magazine covers half undressed but did you hear about Carey Mulligan wearing a towel around her bottom on the cover of Vogue this month? No it's not the latest terry-cloth fashion hot off the runway - as if! - poor Carey was actually the victim of an ill-fitting haute couture dress. As she explains: "The cover dress was very pretty but wouldn't go over my arse. Sample size is very, very tiny. I'm actually wearing a towel around my waist and the bottom is clipped up because I couldn't fit."

While Carey seems to be taking it all remarkably well - further on in the interview she talks about feeling free from the thin pressure that crushes many other actresses her age - but that had to have been at least a little unnerving. You're on the cover of Vogue and you have a priceless dress on your top and a towel on your bottom. What do you say when a Vogue stylist hands you a dress and you can't get it over your hips? And then how do you work a towel into that conversation?? But what really irritates me is that they made her do the cover shoot anyhow, even in such a state. Instead of finding a dress to flatter the already gorgeous actress, they forced the actress into an unflattering dress. All to sell more "aspirational fashion" to women who probably can't fit in it either.

The twisted marketing reminded me of this adventure with Gym Buddy Allison:

Random Suburban Mall, Old Navy, 10:05 a.m.

me: What is THAT?!?

Old Navy now specializes in rib removals. For $10. Suh-weet.

me: Did they lose all the non-anorexic mannequins?

Allison: How do I look?

me: Hi, Cher.

The beauty of a 16-inch waist is you can totally heimlich yourself.

And it gets better. Not only was the shirt pinned within an inch of its sweat-shop life in the back:
But it was a size small to begin with:
We left the store empty handed.

Store mannequins are basically the photoshop of the physical world - you've seen the ones standing (shirtless) sentry at Abercrombie and Fitch, right? - so I don't really expect much. After all, they don't even have heads! Or hands! Or even a spot to house pretend internal organs! And then there's Lane Bryant using a size 8 mannequin to model size 16 + clothing (with more outrageous pinning, I'm sure). But in a world where tiny Carey Mulligan can't fit in the couture dress they forced her to wear on the cover of the magazine anyhow, do we really need mannequins adding to the lies and deception?

What do you think of Carey's confession? Brave or embarrassing? How do you feel about mannequins so small they can't even model the smallest size of clothing in the store? Anyone else feel compelled to manhandle the mannequins?

Normal Push-Ups Getting Boring? Try These Today!

If there's one move that you will find in every workout from Jillian Michael's to CrossFit to Bootcamp to Prison, it's the lowly push-up. (Pushup? Push up? Whatever.) For good reason too, they work your shoulders, back, chest and even your core. But let's be honest, push-ups have their drawbacks. They can be hard on your wrists. They can give you neck or back pain. They can be too difficult. Or they can be too easy, depending on your skill level. But for me the real downside is how boring regular push-ups get. So today the Gym Buddies and I take you into our gym to show you 33 variations on the push-up (and one mammoth fail!). Try one today!

To get a taste of what the Gym Buddies have to put up with from me on a daily basis, here is me demo'ing a gorilla push-up (I voted for calling it a "guerilla" push-up but apparently I'm not tough enough to pull that off). I went into it absolutely sure I couldn't do one and then surprised myself so much by doing one (for reals!!!) that I screamed a very unladylike scream and then hit the floor. Enjoy (12 seconds):



And because everyone's favorite part are the Gym Bloopers, I've left all our mistakes in the full video! (Look for cursing, falling, geometry confusion and one very awesome Mary Katherine lunge - these girls crack me up every single day.) But here is, hands down, my favorite mistake, wherein I crush poor Allison like a cockroach (7 seconds):



Without further adieu, enjoy our Ode to Weird Push-Ups! (It's 4 minutes but totally worth it! At least watch our attempt at sketch comedy in the intro!):

If you get this through e-mail or a feed reader, please click through to the site to see the videos. Thanks!

What is your favorite push-up? Think of any we missed? What exercise do you find realllllyyyy boring??

It's Wedding Time...

Off to Lake Como, Italy for my brother's wedding... will post some photo's and stories when I get back!

Sideswiped By Depression

Chalk it up to a loaded genetic gun, the shortening days, Jelly Bean's self-weaning (she was my oxytocin dealer, yo) or an illness in the family - How about d) all of the above? - but I've dove headlong back into the dumpster of depression. (I have not, however, lost my powers of alliteration. It's like the super power Wonder Woman would have if she wore glasses and had a slight overbite.)

Irritability. Over-sensitivity. Moodiness. Forgetfulness. Sleepiness. Despair-iness. My thoughts swirling like snowflakes through my brain, never settling, never coalescing except to form brief nightmarish pictures for me to obsess over. The bad thing about having prior depressive episodes is that I'm prone to having more of them but the good thing is that I'm really great at recognizing the signs of them. While all of the previous effects are very irritating - especially walking around feeling like my skin's on wrong ways out - the one that has really hamstrung me this time, as in times past, is the anxiety.

And the worst part is this time I didn't see it coming.

After each of my children have been born, I've had a bout with the post-partum "baby blues." They are pretty textbook in their arrival, albeit a little worse than their name belies. They've gotten more severe after each kid. After my third son was born, I was so consumed by obsessive worries over his and his brothers' safety that all I could do was pace back and forth carrying the baby while the other two trailed me like ducklings with PTSD.

But when Jelly Bean was born, we were prepared! My husband made sure that we had plans to go somewhere or that he was home every evening. When he couldn't be with me, he enlisted one of my friends to - and I am not making this up - babysit me until he came home. As long as I was out being busy or with someone older than 10, I could keep the crazy thoughts at bay but leave me alone and... Y'all, I have sundowners. My anxiety, for whatever bizarre reason, peaks at sundown every day and becomes almost unbearable. I know. If I'm this bad at 32, by the time I land in the old folk's home, I'm going to be running naked down the street screaming every evening.

I expected the depression and anxiety after my children were born. I did not expect it to hit again after Jelly Bean weaned. I've never had post-weaning depression before, nor even heard of it! So, other than fist-shaking (see? I am 80!) what can I do? I can feel myself slipping into full-on crazy so I've alerted the appropriate people: my doctor, my husband, my long-suffering sister, my mother, the gym buddies, all 300+ of my friends on Facebook. Oh and now all the thousands of you who read my blog. (I know, I know, if I could just open up, talk to people, stop keeping everything inside already...)

All joking aside, I hate feeling like this. I hate being powerless in the tidal wave of these emotions. I hate sitting for hours in the corner of my kitchen, literally vibrating with anxiety as I will myself to not obsess over not obsessing (how's that for some tautological naval gazing!). I hate snapping at my children every time they make a loud noise (which would be 23 hours of the day). I hate feeling guilty for all my self pity in this world where so many have it much, much worse. I hate feeling like the angsty teen I once was and am so glad to have left behind. I hate knowing what I need to do to help mitigate this - prayer, meditation, walking outdoors, basking in front of my Happy S.A.D. light - and not having enough energy to do it. I hate sitting at the computer to write and having nothing come out. I hate this hate this hate this.

I am smarter than I used to be. I've learned: this is just a waiting game. Give it time. Let the hormones settle out. This will pass. It always does.

Do you ever struggle with depression? What do you do to help yourself? Anyone else's depression manifest in anxiety? Anyone got a good joke for me??

PS> I am not opposed to medication. I've certainly done my time with the happy pills. But I am reticent to go on SSRI's again because I'm very sensitive to medication and I find the side effects to be detrimental to my health and happiness. However, if you have a good meds story I'm willing to hear you out.