What I’m about to tell you is going to make me very unpopular. (Never mind that I spent so much time being unpopular in high school that it is pretty much my natural state of being.) You know that old weight lifting trope “Don’t fear the heavy weights; women don’t have enough testosterone to get bulky.” ? I don’t buy it. (Shun! Shun the non-believer! Shuuuunnnnnn!) While I do absolutely believe that heaving some iron is great for men, women and everyone in between, I also think that women can put on more muscle than we’d like. Sure we’ll never be this guy:

Um, sir? You are having enough nip slippage to make Tara Reid jealous.

But we can get bulkier than we like to be. As material evidence, I kindly submit to the jury my favorite little black dress. Every girl has one – it’s the dress that you can accessorize with anything and makes you look like a million bucks even when you’re post-popcorn and pre-period bloated. My particular LBD is a retro Audrey Hepburn inspired black sheath dress that nips in at just the right spot on my waist and has a neckline so flattering that half the time I don’t even bother with the jewelry. I’d post a pic of me wearing it so we could all ooh and ahh together except: IT WON’T ZIP UP ANYMORE. The trouble spot? Not my usual problem areas – it slips right up over my hips and thighs. It catches on my lats. Of all the stupid spots to have a dress not fit, I cannot think of a less desirable place to gain inches than across my bat-wing territory. For those of you unfamiliar with bodybuilding parlance, your latissimus dorsi are your armpit muscles. Running down the sides of your back, they’re often called the swimmer’s muscle. You can see why:

While they are obviously very functional on Katie Hoff here, I am not an Olympic swimmer and therefore prefer my dress fitting to armpit muscles. I know that this will get some lady lifters all in a tizzy but I never claimed not to be a ridiculous human being.

Continuing on with bodybuilding lore, there are three types of people in this world: Ectomorphs or people who are naturally thin and have a hard time putting on muscle (party like an emo rock star! Or a catwalk model!), Mesomorphs or people who are well balanced with fat and muscle (also known as the type everyone wishes they were, what up Mr. and Miss Universe?), and the poor Endomorphs or people who put on muscle easily but put on fat even more easily (Holla all you rom-com sidekicks!). (Funny aside: the site linked above lists “stalkiness” as an attribute of endomorphs. That might be the awesomest abuse of the English language I’ve seen since my ex-boyfriend e-mailed me that he’d gotten a job as a “night stalker” at the local grocery store. Sadly that turned out to be more true than any of us ever anticipated but hey it kept the local police on their toes. Although in our culture I’m not sure which is the more offensive adjective: stocky or stalky. Perhaps one would rather be stalky.) ANYHOW. I’m pretty darn sure I’m not an ectomorph but whichever the remaining two I am, I don’t like it. And not just because it makes my armpits crazy hard to shave.

I want the bat muscles gone and my dress back. Operation: Lose Muscle.

Gym Buddy Megan – who also hates her bat muscles so see, I’m not the only girl with a dominant vanity gene – and I pinpointed the emergence of our rogue muscles on the P90X Experiment. All those variations on the pull-up had us working our lats like never before. And August’s Swimming Experiment didn’t help either. So what to do?

According to several very authoritative (i.e. Yahoo’s ask-a-question) websites, these are my options listed in order of best to worst:

1. Get the body part set in a cast. This was universally the method of choice for muscle atrophy, after all have you ever seen someone get a cast off their leg? Clearly this works. Also clear: if I think being unable to zip up my dress is embarrassing, I will not be able to handle the public mockery that would ensue if I showed up with armpit casts. Out.

2. Cut your calories to below 800 a day so that your body will go into starvation mode and burn muscle for fuel. Downside: You might die. Also out.

3. Stop working that muscle. Now we’re getting closer. I already use this strategy with my calves. What? I love my calves exactly the way they are and toe raises are tedious. The difference between calves and lats however is that the latter is connected to other very important muscles like, oh, your whole upper body. Kinda out, for reasons of practicality.

4. Lift lighter and increase your reps. Whoooaaa… isn’t this what all the experts tell you not to do? Which means it might just work. Not great, but probably my best option.

What kind of -morph are you? Do you have a muscle you wish would go away? Do you avoid working it to keep it from getting bigger? Or is your philosophy that a girl can never have too much metabolism-firing muscle? Any advice for me? Should I just get the dress altered and be done with it?

At first I blamed it on eating too many cucumber skins. (True story: My garden this year has refused to grow anything except what I call Bastard Zucchinis. These are the inbred love children of cucumbers and zucchinis. They look all squash on the outside but are all juicy seedy cuke on the inside. It’s a rotten switcheroo – have you ever heard of cucumber bread? There’s a reason for that – but the worst part is that they taste like lemons. Horrible vegetables, those. So the only edible item to come out of the garden plot besides the habaneros my husband inexplicably planted are cucumbers. Dozens and dozens of them. ) Then, when the metallic after burn only worsened after a few days I moved on to bigger and better diagnoses. Clearly I must have throat cancer. Or liver disease. Or at the very least a hormone imbalance.

I did what every ailing person does these days – I went to the almighty Google and typed in “Why does my mouth taste like I licked the Gulf Coast?” And the answer became immediately clear: My health food tried to kill me.

This wouldn’t be the first time. A few years ago I confessed my love of raw, soaked beans on here and discovered from many concerned readers that raw beans are way bad for you and kidney beans can kill you if you eat them raw. Whoops! Then I found out that cilantro tastes like soap to people with a certain gene (officially known as the potty-mouth gene), asparagus gives half the population odoriferous pee and beets will make you think you’ve pooped out your intestines in a bloody heap the next day. And now, the latest offender in the health food hall of shame are: Pine Nuts.

That’s right, according to about 5 million web pages, in the past year or so many people have been struck with “pine mouth” – a bitter metallic taste that can last up to four weeks – from eating pine nuts, especially those from China. While the good news is that this does not seem to be the result of poison, toxins or allergies, the bad news is that nobody seems to know why this happens. Not only that but there isn’t any cure for it except to wait it out. It also seems that this is a recent phenomenon, with the first case being reported in 2009. The Center For Disease Control is even tracking the “outbreak” – which you know makes me feel all special and validated in my hypochondria. (CDC: call me!)

I hate waiting things out. We have established that I am not a patient person. My husband had an Oreo cheescake ice cream cake for his birthday and you know what it tasted like? Oreo cheescake ice cream cake… drizzled with liquid mercury. (”How do you know what liquid mercury tastes like Charlotte?” “I’d tell you but those lost IQ points ain’t coming back, sweetheart.”) My beloved wasabi almonds now taste like nuts rolled in lead dust. And drinking water is the worst. My cold, clean, filtered water that I rely on to make happy not-beet-colored pee tastes like the Hudson river. After a rain storm. After a biker’s convention.

The only thing that helps is gum. Which I chew like a cud and use to blow incessant bubbles that sometimes get stuck in my unwaxed lip hair (note to self: make that waxing appointment STAT). I am, and I say this with remorse, an obnoxious gum chewer. But all of you in real life are just going to have to deal with it because according to all of you on Facebook and Twitter who tried to console me (or taunt me, hard to tell with Tweeps sometimes) I have a good 11 days of this yuckiness left.

Beware the pine nut, my friends. (And yes, apparently you can still get pine mouth even if you make it into nummy pesto. Sob.)

Any of you ever got Pine Mouth? Any helpful suggestions?? Have you ever been attacked by your health food? What was your favorite childhood trend from the ’80’s??

Whether they hand it to you as you exit the hospital, a neat little package of the shame you carry for sending your precious infant to the nursery to spend his first night on the planet alone amongst the bright lights and loud noises or whether you don’t discover the little box hidden like a pipe bomb under the baby seat that you realize you’ve installed incorrectly and yet have been using it to tote your fragile baby around for months, it is an inevitability. It hits you like a knife to the stomach twisting your innards as your mind races to all the what-could-haves and thank-God-it-didn’ts as you repeat the Happiest Baby on the Block like so many nursery rhyme Hail Marys in an effort to prevent the worst by imagining all incarnations of it. Once the guilt has finished consuming you from the gut upward in its fiendish flames, it settles in quietly, rock-like, deep inside your person. Some mothers carry their neutron-star guilt in their stomachs perpetually churning with acid, others in their heads in the migraine spot right behind their eyes, but I, I carry mine in my heart. With every beat of my own I can feel the pulse, like an echo, of the hearts of each of my children. From their utmost beginning their hearts have beat inside me – how could I not still be swayed by their rhythm?

I shall tell you all the facts. There aren’t many, it won’t take long. Indeed, on the grand scale of parental mistakes this one is perhaps minor. But it is the thing that it represents that so wounds me: my ability to hurt my children even while doing my best to protect them. But I am ahead of myself.

Anyone who has had a baby, seen a baby, read about a baby or just happens to have breasts will know what a contentious topic breast feeding is. Breast is best! The zeal imbued into this cannot be overstated. It’s healthier for both mom and baby – it is a magic elixir that prevents health problems now and in the future! Plus, it’s free. And yet, knowing this as all of us breast-endowed women (and most men too, I’d wager) do, how is that the vast majority do not breast feed? Or if they do, they don’t do it for long?

I’ll tell you why. It’s hard. It may be a natural process but it sure doesn’t come naturally. At least it didn’t for me. Nobody told me how much it would hurt – like rug burns with the scabs getting ripped off every 2-3 hours around the clock – until the baby’s suckling finally turned my nipples into pencil erasers. Nobody told me of the yeast infections passed back and forth like some insane game of hot potato but where the winner gets their mouth painted purple with gentian violet. Nobody told me of the stage where infants turn piranha and, literally, bite the one that feeds them. Nobody warned me of the nursing strikes, the engorgement, the clogged ducts, the cumbersome nursing bras, the mastitis, the banning of all medicine except worthless Tylenol, the double pump milking machine that is so similar to the ones they use on cows that you can’t help but moo, the spontaneous public let downs at the mere thought of my baby’s cry. (On an airplane, wetting a stranger’s head no less! The only thing that could have made that flight more perfect was if my last name were Joad.)

I don’t tell you this to discourage you from ever nursing but rather, having been through all of this multiple times, to explain to you why nursing means so much to me. I have fought so hard to do this simplest of things. To be the mother who can feed her baby.

But now for the facts I promised you. The Jelly Bean was born hale and hearty at 8 1/2 pounds, by far my smallest baby but fairly large as babies in general go. She took to nursing right away and at first all seemed to go well. She was back up to her birth weight by two weeks, just as expected. She pooped and peed like a champ. But along about 3 months, something changed. She stopped gaining weight. The doctor wasn’t overly concerned. “Bring her back in a month for another weigh-in.” I did. But at that check-up and every check-up that has followed, her weight percentile has continued to drop. Eventually the doctor suggested a lactation consultant who in turn suggested a number things of which I all tried. While she still didn’t gain any weight, I comforted myself that she was meeting all of her milestones and seemed happy and healthy in every other measurable way.

And then she weaned herself. Or perhaps my milk gave out. I think the problem might have started with my breasts. I began to notice her fussing when it came time to nurse and despite her frantic sucking, the milk would not let down. Eventually she stopped trying to suck all together, straight-arming me and crying whenever I laid her down to nurse. I, always stubborn, refused to let the nursing go. I went for days trying to keep feeding her only to continue to be rejected. Finally, after a particularly teary session on both our parts, I gave up and made her a bottle of formula. She didn’t like that either. At my wit’s end, I called the beleaguered pediatrician again who said I either had to get her nurse again or to take the formula and it had to be done now. My milk was finished. I enticed her to drink the bottle by adding a sprinkling of Strawberry Quik powder to it (desperate times call for artificially flavored measures!).

I am happy to say that Jelly Bean loves her formula now (and we no longer have to spike it with Quik to get her to drink it). I am also happy to report that in the few weeks she’s been on formula her weight bounced up to the appropriate percentile quite quickly. All’s well that ends well. Right?

Those are the facts. Now for the questions. Was my milk compromised because of my obsession with losing the baby weight? Was her failure to gain weight due to my early and intense return to exercise? Or because of my very restrictive diet? It was during those middle months of my being a no-wheat, no-dairy calorie-counting vegetarian that she lost the most ground. Was my tumble into sane eating too late? The question that haunts me: Did I sacrifice my daughter’s health on the altar of my own vanity?

My guilt may be misplaced. There are other explanations, other narratives I could tell for this story. (At the very least, the process of weaning has called down a hellstorm of hormones that alone could account for my angst.) And yet the guilt gnaws at me. I carry their very lives in my hands – how could it not?

If you’re a mom – how did nursing go for you? Were you able to nurse and exercise with no problems? If you aren’t a mom, what do you have irrational guilt about? Or are you one of those rare women (whom I envy) that is impervious to guilt?

Great news: I just found out (thanks to several of you astute readers!) that my book is available for pre-order on Amazon! Woohoooo! I can’t even tell you how amazing it feels to write that sentence. This process has taken nearly two years but it’s finally happening. And seeing the cover, up there, with all those other real books and real authors made it feel really real. (Ok, so part of me still won’t believe it until I’m holding it in my sweaty little hands but I’m visceral like that).

Wanna see it? Click here to check me out in all my nerd glory (you can take the girl out of the lab but you can’t get her out of the beaker…) and while you’re there you can also pre-order The Great Fitness Experiment: One Year of Trying Everything!

What you get:
If you order right now you get a free shamwow juicer ab roller with every book! Kidding. But you do get it for $10.08. If you wait to buy it until it comes out (pub date is still Dec. 1st from what I understand) then the price will go back up to $14.98. So save 5$ and pre-order now!

In the book I break down all the Experiments I did for the first year of writing this blog. While they are the same Experiments you already read about (if you’ve been with me that long and boy howdy do I love you for sticking around! Remember when my blog was all black with white text and I was an awkward Goth with orange hair??) but in the book I detail the theory behind each workout, the workout itself, what shenanigans ensued in the gym and all the crazy going on out of the gym along with my conclusions.

Bonus: I include either a highlight (hilarious story that never made it into a blog post) or lowlight (hilarious and embarrassing story that never made it into a blog post) of every Experiment, including the absolute lowest moment of my exercise addiction. And no, I never wrote about it on here because I was too ashamed of it at the time.

In between each Experiment are personal essays excerpted from this blog that favorites of mine.

To all of you who have cheered me on each step of the way, I cannot tell you how much that has meant to me. To all of you have already pre-ordered my book (Hi, mom!) I am amazed and unbelievably grateful. My only goal in this is to sell enough copies that they give me the privilege of writing another book so thank you for helping my dream come true. I could not do it without you guys!!! (Or my exclamation key!!!!!)

PS> For those of you wondering what I’m reading these days: Just finished both of Sloane Crosleys books of essays – thanks to those of you who recommended her to me, she’s amazing and I totally recommend her! I also recommend Shanghai Girls (fiction) and On Hitler’s Mountain (non-fic). I’m currently in the middle of Gary Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories and it is blowing my mind. It is a research junkies dream!

What are you reading right now? Got any more recs for me??

1. I got them cheap. (Thanks to Gym Buddy Allison who is such a super bargain shopper that her entire basement is full of hundreds of Sobe drinks that she got for FREE. Seriously, a whole pound of chia seeds plus a bag of cinnamon bears cost me 1$)

2. They are the Holy Grail of health nuts. Er, seeds. If you’ve been ’round these parts long enough then you too have heard the campfire tales of the elusive chia seed with it’s plant-sourced Omega-3’s and tapioca-like gelling abilities. Before we continue any farther, we are indeed talking about these chia seeds:

Oh yes, the kind you used to grow green hair on clay heads as a kid is actually a super-duper nutrient dense seed. Not only are they the richest plant source of omega-3 fatty acids (they kick flax seed’s butt so bad MMA fighters take notes) but they also have a ton of fiber, protein and such a stellar nutrient profile that legend has they cure everything from runner’s leg cramps to gout. However, like all truly great health foods, it is ridiculously difficult to find. (Related tangent: I once asked my local grocer if he had any purslane – greens known for their omega-3 fatty acids – and he replied, “You mean the new designer purse line at Target?” Setting aside the obvious question of why my burly, male, mid-50’s grocer would follow designer purse lines at Target, the reason I was asking about the plant is because chickweed (as it is also known) grows practically everywhere – except in my yard. My neighbor however has an abundant supply in the cracks of his driveway. You should have seen his face the morning he walked out to start his car and found all of my kids and I eating the weeds that grow in his driveway. He didn’t know whether to call the cops or sit down and try a bite. So obviously I needed to try and find a more reliable – and less car oil drenched – source. Sadly, I never did.)

Chia seeds first landed on my radar a couple of years ago when some of my favorite bloggers started mixing them into smoothies and puddings and whatnot. I love me a good food fad! So I immediately set out to find them. Nowhere in Minnesota carries them. Not even the Whole Foods that I drove 45 minutes just for this one item. (Environment be darned, this is my health we’re talking about! Oh, wait…) The endless searching made them take on mythic proportions in my mind. Oh if only I had chia seeds, I rhapsodized, not only would I poop rainbows and unicorns (owie!) but they’d be smarter, less ADHD unicorns! (Weirdly, chia seeds are being touted as a natural cure for ADHD – somebody alert Lindsay Lohan!)

And now I have some. And they taste like birdseed. And the bag is mocking me. Because all I can think to do with them is find some of that magic paste and use it to glue the seeds to Jelly Bean’s adorable little head and see if I can’t get her to grow some decent hair after her next bath. (I finally get a girl and she still has naught but duck fluff covering her pate! It’s adorable duck fluff but still, how am I supposed to give her Shirley Temple curls with fluff?)

Ah, but she is so stinkin’ cute even with the crazy hair!

Have you tried chia seeds? Do you love them? Help me! What do I do with chia seeds now that I have them? What random ingredient have you gone on a crazy goose chase trying to find? You ever have a chia pet?

Hmm… which one is Krista? I’ll give you a hint: she’s wearing black.

I can relate. In a previous post I mentioned how, as a Mormon, I fast at least once a month for a full 24 hour period. Sagan of Living Healthy in the Real World, asked me to write a post about my experience with voluntary starvation.

Spiritual Benefits
First, I would like to say that for me, fasting is primarily a religious endeavor, a matter of faith. Fasting isn’t just about not eating and drinking but is primarily about building a closer relationship with God. The 24 hours is supposed to be a time of prayer, meditation and study. In addition, we donate the money we would have spent on food to the poor and needy in our area so as to keep our focus on serving others. I’m not going to lie: going that long without food or water isn’t easy and sometimes it makes me seriously grouchy but I’m not perfect and if anyone knows that, it’s God. I figure He’s pretty forgiving when I make the kids eat PB&J’s because I don’t want to cook them something I’m going to have to smell and drool over.

Physical Benefits
That said, there are a lot of benefits to fasting (or intermittent fasting, “IF”, as if is often referred to) that extend quite firmly into the physical sphere. Long considered the purview of the incense-and-nutritional-yeast crowd or filed under The Weird Things Hollywood Types Do, fasting isn’t generally on most people’s radar. But recent research shows that this primitive survival technique may actually have some impressive health benefits.

New research from the American Heart Association found that people who fasted were 39% less likely to have coronary artery disease. This study looked at a sample of 4500 men and women, 90% of whom were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, popularly known as the Mormons. Previously researchers had thought that the Mormons’ lower risk of heart disease was due to their religious prohibition against smoking but researchers were surprised to find it most correlated to the monthly 24-hour fasts that adherents practice.

In addition to the heart benefits, Mark Sisson of Mark’s Daily Apple and guru of all things IF cites a study that showed, ““health benefits… in insulin resistance, asthma, seasonal allergies, infectious diseases of viral, bacterial and fungal origin (viral URI, recurrent bacterial tonsillitis, chronic sinusitis, periodontal disease), autoimmune disorder (rheumatoid arthritis), osteoarthritis, symptoms due to CNS inflammatory lesions (Tourette’s, Meniere’s) cardiac arrhythmias (PVCs, atrial fibrillation), menopause related hot flashes.” Mark is so convinced of the benefits that he has made fasting one of the primary points of his Primal Blueprint and encourages everyone to try it. Many other studies support the health benefits of fasting including increased insulin sensitivity, faster healing from injury, cellular rejuvenation, decreased blood pressure, reduction in oxidative damage, less type 2 diabetes, less cancer, less cardiovascular disease, protection against heart disease and – the holy grail of health nuts – decreased fat mass. Who wouldn’t want all that awesomeness??

Psychological Benefits
Another benefit of fasting, according to Dr. Judith Beck, author of the popular Beck Diet Solution is that it helps you to see that “hunger is not an emergency.” So many dieters derail from their carefully planned meals when the hunger pains strike because they think they are starving. They think that if they don’t eat immediately then they will be overwhelmed by their hunger when the truth is that hunger waxes and wanes and you will not die if you don’t eat for a few hours. Dr. Beck points out that once her patients fast for at least one meal, they see for themselves that they can survive and thrive despite hunger that their cravings have less power over them and it becomes easier to stick with that diet.

But…
Many people, especially hard-core fitness types (ahem, my name is Charlotte and I’m an addict…), fear if they don’t get some nutrition every 3-5 hours then they will lose muscle and kill their metabolisms. Actually the opposite is true, according to Mark Sisson (the man with all the answers). “It all makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, because our predecessors almost certainly went through regular cycles where food was either abundant or very scarce. The body may have established protective mechanisms to adapt to these conditions by sensitizing insulin receptors when it was critical that every bit of food be efficiently used or stored (as in famine), or by desensitizing them when there was a surplus, so the body wouldnt be overly-burdened by grossly excessive calorie intake.”

Food is great. It’s delicious (usually) and fun to eat and everyone, everywhere needs to eat it. Going against this primal urge is difficult, especially at first. While there are, of course, reasons why some should not attempt fasting (if you are struggling with an eating disorder, for instance, or diabetic or hypoglycemic) for most of us it can be an awesome experience on many levels.

To try it, pick a day when you don’t have a lot going on (the day of your big presentation or your final exam is probably not the best time to start this) – I usually choose my rest day so I don’t have to worry about dying of thirst after a run – and just plan to skip a meal*. Then try skipping two. The type of fast you do – juice, water only, full abstinence – is up to you. There are as many types as there are people. Just take careful note of how it makes you feel and what, if any, differences you notice. Fasting may be the cheapest and simplest health “products” out there! (Note I did not say “easiest”.)

Caveat: When people discover that I fast, they generally say “Oh, you must lose so much weight!” This would not be true. Both Krista and I have noticed that fasting does not cause either of us to lose weight. While the research shows that fasting, over a long period of time, can help you maintain a healthy weight, it doesn’t work like a crash diet dropping 10 pounds in 10 days.

Have I convinced you to try it? Have any of you fasted before? What kind did you do and how did it make you feel? Do any of you have religious practices that affect your workout? Ever drank out of a stranger’s water bottle by mistake?

*Be smart. Check with your doctor first if you have any health concerns. I am not a doctor, a nurse, a guru of anything or even all that smart sometimes (as evidenced by my massive collection of ridiculous footwear). If you start to feel sick, stop immediately.

I could learn a few things from Little Sister. And not just how to barf with class. I’m terrible at saying no. It’s the curse of the people pleaser – if someone deigns to ask you to do something for them, you say yes and thank them for the privilege. If I were perfect at this, I would be sainted by now and Mother Theresa and I would be swapping tips over whatever it is people drink in heaven. As you should know by now though, I am a case study of Imperfect.

My problem is that I often say “yes” when I know I should say “no” and then passive-aggressively take it out on the asker. Consider my ex-boyfriend Julian. He wanted to get married. I wanted to be 19 and unencumbered. So when the time came to move him into the “ex” category, did I just (wo)man up and tell him no, I would not marry him? Of course not! I made up an elaborate lie about how my dad (I’m sorry dad!) had gotten cancer (I’m sorry cancer sufferers!) and I had to drop out of school to go home to Chicago (I’m sorry Windy City!) to care for him. I even managed to eke out a few tears as I explained why our love could never be.

The lie worked brilliantly for about a week. Until he called to ask my roommate for a forwarding address to which he could send a card and she said, “Charlotte’s right here. Why don’t you ask her yourself?” and handed me the phone. Um, awkward. Talk about the worst way ever to break up with someone. A simple no would have been better all around.

Fortunately I’m thirteen years past that atrocity and can laugh about it now. (Hopefully he’s somewhere laughing about it too and not throwing darts at my face.) But I still have a ridiculously hard time saying no. So you will be very proud of me when I tell you that I got an e-mail to try out a super duper cool new fitness gadget that tracks your calories and energy expended and sleep patterns and everything… and I turned it down. While it made me sad to turn my back on a cutting edge fitness gadget, I knew in my heart of hearts that using it would undo all the hard work I’ve done these past few months. I’ve finally broken that cycle of tracking every bit of food in and every drop of sweat out. And I can’t go back to that again and keep my sanity.

I said no.

It didn’t feel good. I’m one of those chronic second-guessers. When I’m bored waiting in lines, for fun I’ll go over all my past mistakes and try out different scenarios until I find one that would have been better or until my number at the pharmacy comes up. And so the second after I sent the e-mail I panicked. What if it turns out to be the next IT thing and I missed the boat? What if all the other cool bloggers try it out and rave about it and I look lame and out of touch? What if it would have given me the body of my dreams??

But then today I felt good about it. Because saying no to this one thing is actually saying yes to taking care of myself. Yes to listening to and trusting my body. Yes to eating ice cream, sometimes. Yes to skipping a workout, sometimes.

Possibly related to the Yes: This morning I stepped on the scale and it was up two pounds. Instead of my usual closet-crying and day of mourning routine, I looked in the mirror and thought, “It’s wrong. I feel awesome. I look great!”

Do you have a hard time saying no too? What do you say no to in order to say yes to your health? Anyone else ever broke up with an ex in a really cruel way?

Either you’re a swimmer or you’re not. False dichotomy though it may be, there is an easy test to see which camp you fall in. When someone tells you, “Let’s swim half a mile.” do you answer, “Sure! It only takes me 4 or 5 minutes to run a half mile so this should be a piece of cake!”? If so, you are not a swimmer. If you answer, “How far is a half mile? Like… 10 laps?” you are not a swimmer. If you even think, “Are goggles and a swim cap really mandatory? ‘Cause the former make my eyes bulge like Marty Feldman and the latter is just ugly.” then you are not a swimmer. (Although you are wicked good with your ’80’s movie trivia!)

If you just snap your goggles into place, jump into the pool with nary a whimper about the cold and start stroking, then you are a swimmer.

Our first pool workout for August’s Great Fitness Experiment went swimmingly – you knew that was coming! – all the way up to the point where we actually got in the water. Our Y being, well, our Y, naturally there were no lanes open for actual swimming as they prefer to keep 99% of the pool available for elderly aquatics classes that oddly resemble square dancing in slow motion. So we were banished to the “leisure pool” where we did a pool workout that I got from Fitness magazine. It was ridiculously easy. We tried everything we could to get our hearts pumping but instead we ended up comparing our pedicures while sculling in random circles around the pool. (Gym Buddy Megan’s toenails were a classic red, mine were a zombie-esque blue and Allison’s were naked, poor thing. Knowledge you needed; you’re welcome.)

If you will recall, the entire purpose of August’s Swimming Experiment was to get Gym Buddy Allison ready for her very first triathlon, a sprint tri that included a half-mile open water swim. Clearly, pedi-sculling and otter-rolling over a beach ball (which is awesome fun, by the way) were not going to get us to that point. So we did what we had to do and started swimming some laps. In the 3-foot leisure pool. It only took three laps before the old folks attacked.

“You’re not allowed to swim in the swimming pool!” yelled a white-haired gent without a trace of irony.

“Yeah,” chimed in a woman who was obviously very invested in keeping her bouffant dry, “this is a LEISURE pool.”

“Well I happen to find this very leisurely,” Allison explained sweetly as we backstroked around them like some sort of rogue synchronized swimming team taking hostages.

The next day we were back in the pool again but for real this time. There was one lane open for lap swimming and we intended to use the heck out of it. No matter that it was already occupied by three other women which would make six of us in one lane. We optimistically snapped on our goggles (I borrowed mine from my eight-year-old – I’m Batman!) and plunged in.

“So… half a mile,” I said. “How far is that exactly?”

“I dunno,” Allison replied. “Let’s ask the lifeguard.”

“Do you mean a swimmer’s mile or a land mile?” he asked in return.

Allison started to answer but I interrupted her with, “Whichever one is shorter.”

After giving me a long considering look as if to decide whether to address me as an adult or the child I was acting like, he answered, “A swimmer’s mile is 35 laps.” (Another way to tell you are not a swimmer is to be unaware of the controversy surrounding how far a swimmer’s mile actually is. There is calculus involved.)

We sighed with relief. “We can swim down this thing 35 times, no problem!” Allison chirped.

“You do know that a ‘lap’ means down and back, right?” he added.

No, sir. No we did not know that. (I must point out here that Megan did, in fact, know this but she was not there at this juncture and so it was just Allison and I, as clueless as one can be in Batman goggles.)

“Okay, we got this. We just have to swim down there 70 times!”

“No, wait,” I pointed out, “we have to halve that!”

“So…. that’s…” Crickets.

“Half of 70 is 35. And half of 30 is 15 plus 4 which is… 19!” I announced erroneously.

“I thought it was 18,” Allison said, also wrong. (Why oh why did they have to pick an odd number?)

“Why didn’t we just ask the lifeguard for a half a mile in the first place?”

“Well we can’t ask him now. He already thinks we’re idiots.”

“We are idiots.”

“Let’s just start swimming and see how far we can get, ok?” Did I mention Allison only had two weeks to train for her triathlon? There’s a reason the girl was getting antsy.

We made it four laps before we were clutching the side of the pool and gasping for breath. I will tell you this: In three years of trying every conceivable workout I have never been so close to vomiting as I was in that moment. There are workouts and then there is swimming. It was a gut-wrenchingly, head-to-toe achingly, can’t-breathe-for-at-least-3-life-threatening-reasons brutal workout. For the first time I understood why people watch the Summer Olympics for events other than gymnastics.

I was ready to be done. But Megan was already off like a fish, ahead of us by 10 laps or so, and Allison was on a mission. We pressed on for the full half mile. (-ish, my counting got a little garbled. Turns out I can’t even do basic math when my Batman goggles turn out to be complete duds and yet I have to drive home so I can’t lose a contact thereby forcing me to swim with my head out of the water the entire time making me almost as ridiculous as the Bouffant Lady.)

The next day I was sore everywhere, just like several of you warned me I would be. The strangest part was that I was most sore right under each butt cheek, where my leg joins my derriere. Who knew I even had a muscle there?! The worst effect though was – heaven help me – the Gym Buddies freaking loved it. LOVED IT.

Sensing lap workouts long after August ends, I broke down and bought a decent pair of goggles. I still hate swimming. But I hate it a little less than I used to. Plus, I have to admire a workout that brutal. It never did get much easier for me – every swimming workout felt like choreographed drowning – but I did love how it made me feel when we finished.

As for Allison, despite having never swam in open water, girlfriend finished her tri under two hours and suffered nothing more serious than chocolate-covered cleavage thanks to a protein bar she was inexplicably storing down her top.

Which necessitated a little post-race clean up:

(Not pictured: my four-year-old son eating the protein bar off the ground while the rest of us were distracted congratulating her.)

She rocked the running and biking portions and, more importantly, got bit by the tri bug and is already planning her next one! Way to go, Al!!

Gym Buddy Megan and I (a.k.a. The Dry Ones) flanking our victorious girl!

So, any of you change your mind about swimming this month? Anyone else in the “I don’t hate it but I’ll never love it” club? What’s your favorite Summer Olympics event to watch??

Until it gets complicated.

Behind the scenes:

1. Sponsors often have a lot of rules governing giveaways and product reviews such as how many posts must be run, what key words must be used, what sites need to be linked, what commenters need to do to win, product pictures and so forth. This varies from company to company with some being super duper control freaks to others that are totally hands off and chill. And sometimes you don’t know which way it’s going to be until you’re committed.

2. Individual bloggers often add more rules on top those like giving extra entries for tweeting/facebooking/linking the giveaway on their own pages.

3. Ad networks, like BlogHer and FoodBuzz, have their own rules on top of all the other rules for giveaways. For instance, a giveaway must be hosted on an ad-free page or must be under a certain dollar amount. To further confuse things, the ad companies sometimes sponsor promotions and giveaways themselves which change the rules yet again. And if you break any of the rules there is a penalty.

In Front of the Scenes: (um, wha? What word am I looking for here??)

1. While I’ve never had a company tell me the opinion I must have about their product, I have had some companies lean pretty hard on me to give a positive review. And while I try to stay objective – my first obligation is to you guys, not to them – it can get tricky, especially if they are paying for the review and/or are giving away a valuable product. I’m going to be totally honest: it’s really really hard to give a negative review of something when you’ve gotten it for free. There’s a reason you hardly ever see a blogger write anything bad about a company or product – if I can’t find any positives about a product, I’ll usually kill the review rather than put up a negative one. Bloggers typically don’t make much money (if they make any money at all) from our blogs, so a little free swag goes a long way.

2. Some companies will give me free stuff to try. Others will give me free stuff and offer freebies for my readers. Still others will offer stuff only for my readers. And still others will give away free product and pay money for the review. Thanks to the FTC ruling last year (which I do think is a good thing), bloggers now have to be a lot more transparent about how exactly we’re being compensated but there is still a lot of confusion. Companies that are giving away stuff and paying for the review will often have very specific ways in which they want their product blogged about – which is totally fine as long as everyone is up front about it – but this agreement takes the blogger out of the “impartial reviewer” camp and into the “paid employee” camp. Every blogger handles this conundrum a little differently. Some don’t use ad networks so there will never be a conflict of interest. Others refuse to do giveaways. Some refuse to do a product review unless they buy the item themselves or have sought out the company (rather than the other way around). Most of us accept the products and just try to be really open in our blogs about the fact that we got it for free and hope that you guys will understand that.

3. Readers have different reactions to reviews/giveaways. Some people live for giveaways and will never comment unless it is a giveaway post (which doesn’t bother me in the least, by the way). Other people feel abused by the blogger and/or the company when a paid review is put up, saying that a blog-vertisement is a lot different than, say, a column ad down the side of the page. I’ve had impassioned readers e-mail me ecstatic about the giveaways and others that are furious that I’m “selling out.” In addition, there has been concern in the blogosphere about how winners are chosen. Sometimes the company chooses the winning comment. Sometimes they’ll let me choose but specify a random number generator must be used. Others give me no direction. Most times I am involved in the process.

For myself, even though it creates a lot of extra work for me (communicating with companies, running the contest, contacting winners, writing targeted posts/tweets/etc., setting up extra sites/pages for the ad company rules and so on), I’ve felt like the giveaways are worthwhile because I love being able to hook you guys up with cool, free stuff! I’ve even taken on giveaways before for things that I’m not all that interested in because I figure that it will be perfect for one of you. But a few e-mails from readers lately have got me rethinking that stance. I would really appreciate your feedback on this! (Sorry for the interruption to our regularly scheduled health, fitness and craziness programming. It will resume as usual on Monday.)

So now I’m asking you guys: How do you feel about product reviews and giveaways? I’ve created a handy poll below (click through to my site if you get this via a reader or e-mail) so you can stay anonymous if you like. Feel free to add any additional thoughts or tell me about how you run giveaways/reviews on your own blog in the comments. I’ll take all the advice I can get!

UPDATE: MizFit is covering this same thing today! Great minds think alike, eh?

It is estimated that about 25% of college students take Adderall or Ritalin for non-medical purposes. No one really knows for sure because students are understandably reluctant to ‘fess up to their amphetamine use although ask any college student you know and they’ll likely tell you it’s easier to get an Adderall than a beer. Prescriptions of the drug are up 3100% over the past several years which only increases the black-market viability. Even in my un-hip over-30 demographic, I run out of hands to count on before I run out of people I know who have used it.

A while ago, I wrote about an experience where a friend at the gym approached me about taking Adderall to lose weight. She called it “the perfect life in a pill” and was so persuasive in her efforts (and descriptive in her how-to’s) that I was sorely tempted to give it a try myself. Although it’s not mentioned in any of my pregnancy manuals, being that I’m a nursing mom and we’re not even allowed to eat unpasteurized cheese I’m pretty sure that recreational prescription drug abuse is a no-no. I wrote the post in an effort to cleanse myself of thoughts of magically fitting skinny jeans and brilliant articles that write themselves. But it was all the comments you guys left me detailing your horrific experiences with it and the many detrimental (and potentially life threatening) side effects that really sealed it for me. I never tried it. Seriously, anyone contemplating non-medical Adderall use should go read through that comment thread.

For those people truly afflicted with AD/HD, the drug can be a lifesaver but for people wrongly diagnosed, the fallout can be severe. According to doctors, Lindsay is not AD/HD and should never have been prescribed the drug – small comfort, I’m sure, as she roasts on the spit of public condemnation. But in a world where achievement is everything and our public figures are only as good as their last interview, it doesn’t take much imagination to figure out how she would end up with her very own golden ticket on a Rx pad.

What happens to Lindsay Lohan now that she’s been taken off the meds is anyone’s guess. Perhaps she’ll metamorphose overnight back into the moppet we all loved and start being a reliable actress again. Or maybe she’ll go on a coke bender and all our speculation about whether her symptoms were “cocaine-like” or just “cocaine” will be ended. For the record, I hope it’s the former. As much as I love a good train wreck, I prefer the ones where everyone walks out alive.

Either way though we now have conclusive proof, walking around in padded-knee “Presidential” leggings, that Adderall can make you crazy. To this end, Lindsay may end up being a more powerful cautionary tale about the risks of abusing prescription stimulants than any D.A.R.E. campaign college boards could imagine. At the very least I suppose I owe her a thank-you card.

Have you ever used Adderall or another stimulant for an off-label purpose? Do you really think Lindsay’s problems are all the result of a bad ADHD diagnosis?