Lift, Laugh, Love Another Helping of Tips, Tricks, and Uncomfortable Overshares from The Great Fitness Experiment

by Hilton Andersen, Charlotte

• ISBN13: 9781578605033
• ISBN10: 1578605032
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2013-12-01
• Publisher: Clerisy Press

Summary

Charlotte Hilton Andersen's successful fitness memoir, The Great Fitness Experiment: One Year of Trying Everything, saw her go from a non-exercising new mom to a thinner-but-crazier exercise addict as she tried a new fitness experiment on her blog every month.

In the sequel, Lift, Laugh, Love, Charlotte explores her 12 favorite experiments from the past three and a half years through the use of humor, research, pop culture and personal essays. In the three and a half years since she finished that first year, she has continued with a new fitness program every 30 days. Charlotte goes to eating disorder therapy, has her fifth child and continues to try everything under the sun. Except this time she finds what works for her and her body when it comes to food and exercise. It’s not a magic formula, and she's not perfect at it, but she's banished most of her demons and come to a place health and peace. Included in this book are reader favorites like P90X, swimming, boot camp and Charlotte's own favorites like Rachel Cosgrove’s program, yoga, and intuitive eating.

Author Biography

Charlotte Hilton Andersen is the author of the book The Great Fitness Experiment: One Year of Trying Everything. She runs the popular health and fitness website of the same name, where she tries out a new workout every month, specializing in exercise, body image and oversharing. She was named one of Demand Media's top 3 bloggers for 2010, one of Fitness Magazine's favorite fitness bloggers and a fitness expert by Experience Life Magazine's A Revolutionary Act. On a regular basis she writes for The Huffington Post, Redbook Magazine, iVillage, Men's Fitness, Shape Magazine and BlogHer. In addition, she has been featured on ABC's 20/20 and Fox's morning show and interviewed on Fox, NBC and many radio stations. Her writing has appeared in several health and fitness magazines as well as the online content of The Washington Post, USA Today, Fox News, and Livestrong among others. A former professor, her night job is grading the SAT essay where she gets to grade 500 high school essays each answering the same prompt, causing her to curse any time The Scarlet Letter is mentioned in her presence. She is a mom of five currently going crazy in Minnesota.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Meditation
Everyone says it’s good for you. The research supporting it is numerous and convincing. You know you should do it. It requires no equipment and very little time. So for the love of little green apples why is it so hard to sit still? As a consummate Type-A, only-happy-when-I’m-insanely-busy mom, I chuck the “picture a tiny bud opening to the sunshine” nonsense and figure out how to find calm in a world that is anything but.
Personal Essay: Finding Myself: On Medicating and Meditating

Chapter 2: Pregnancy
Just when I thought I’d found my fitness groove, I got pregnant with our 5th child - a situation that many a woman is familiar with. Between fielding awkward questions from strangers (“Why yes we do know how this happens! Are you looking for tips?”) and dealing with the routine physical issues that come with growing an entire human being, my workouts went to all-new highs... and lows. Thankfully my daughter was born healthy, happy and just as sassy as her mom.
Personal Essay: What I Mean When I Say I Have 5 Children (On having a baby after losing one.)

Chapter 3: Fitness Blogger Challenge
What do you do when someone gives you a challenge? Ever since I was a child I have never been able to turn down a double-dog dare so when a personal trainer lined up a group of fitness blogger all-stars for a charity competition, things got pretty heated in the gym. We won, of course, but hilarity ensued as the Gym Buddies and I discovered we would do almost anything to get to the top.
Personal Essay: The Exercise Widow(er) Phenomenon

Chapter 4: P90X
Tony Horton is a legend in the fitness industry and if you haven’t seen one of his infomercials for P90X or its successor, Insanity, then clearly you need more late-night TV in your life (and maybe a Shakeweight). He’s charismatic, he’s ripped and he’s probably a billionaire because his programs cost several hundred dollars a piece. Is it worth the money? Your coworker swears it got him in the best shape of his life. The Gym Buddies and I swear he kicked our butts. But all was not peachy keen as people started getting injured.
Personal Essay: What Finally Made Me Seek Help for my Exercise Addiction

Chapter 5: Okinawan longevity study
The “Seven Countries Study” is one of the most studied, reported-on and influential pieces of research in the health world. It’s also one of the most vilified. Does Ancel Keys really find the secret to perfect health well past the centenarian mark? I find out what it’s like to live like an Okinawan despite being neither Japanese nor elderly. But hey I like sushi so what could go wrong? Lots of things apparently.
Personal Essay: How Audrey Hepburn Ruined My Day

Chapter 6: Intuitive Eating
Oprah loves Geneen Roth, the author of Women, Food and God and other tomes on the style of eating called “Intuitive Eating”, and everyone knows that Oprah never misses when it comes to health and weight loss, right? Oh, right. It might be just Oprah-hype but after years of eating disorders and a generally awful relationship with food I’m ready to try anything. The stakes are high because I’ll do anything to spare my baby girl the agony of what I’ve been through. Thankfully the program turns out to be as life-changing as I needed it to be and I make the first of several major breakthroughs with my health.
Personal Essay: The Price of Cake Has Gone Up This Year

Chapter 7: Quitting blogging
It was inevitable. The stress of running a very popular health and fitness blog for several years was finally causing me to crack. While I didn’t want to admit it to my readers - or even myself - blogging was fuelling my unhealthy addiction to exercise. It was a gut-wrenching day when I decided to let go of the one thing that had brought me so far. The break ended up being short-lived. Apparently what I needed was a one-month vacation from the Internet but I am dramatic if nothing else. When I came back though, it was with a new plan and new resolve to get healthy and stay healthy.
Personal Essay: I Dream of Flying

Chapter 8: Swimming
Controlled drowning. That is what swimming is to me. So despite years of readers requesting I do a swimming experiment, I adamantly refused. I hate swimming. But what good is Experimenting if I only try things I like? This month found me picking Speedo wedgies in the lake and getting beat by elderly swimmers at my gym. The Gym Buddies all loved it. I hated every minute of it. But I learned some really important things both about fitness - people do not like it when you puke in the pool - and about myself.
Personal Essay: Perfectionism: Not Living Up to My Potential

Chapter 9: Sep 2010 - Boot Camp
There’s just something about having someone get right in your face and scream at you to really make you move (and move your bowels). But what if the drill sergeant is more akin to a smiley Muppet than G.I. Joe? The Gym Buddies and I get our butts handed to us as we do one of the most popular fitness trends in America: paid masochism.
Personal Essay: The Magic Bullet for Losing Weight and Keeping it Off

Chapter 10: Racing
Every year hundreds of thousands of people sign up to run in races. Running is the most popular sport to do in America and usually the first thing a person does when they decide to “get fit” is lace on those running shoes. The Gym Buddies and I sign up to run a 10-mile race together and after a month of hard training, detailed costume planning (it’s Halloween baby!) and playlist-making, I manage to mess everything up with one nearly fatal mistake. Sadly I’m not just being hyperbolic. This Experiment almost killed me.
Personal Essay: Who Would I Be if I Weren’t Broken?

Chapter 11: Rachel Cosgrove’s The Female Body Breakthrough
Women and weight lifting have long had a tumultuous relationship. Jane Fonda introduced us to the concept with candy-colored baby ‘bells but recent years have seen an explosion in lady lifters and they’re pumping some serious iron. What happens when the Gym Buddies and I give up all our cardio to lift - and lift heavy - every day for two months? The results will surprise you: never before in any Experiment have we had such crazy and amazing results. This one is guaranteed to make you reconsider your philosophy about fitness.
Personal Essay: Where is the Line Between Your Weight and Yourself? (Kicking the scale habit.)

Chapter 12: Yoga
I do a lot of indelicate things in my Experiments so it surprises a lot of people that my favorite type of exercise to do is yoga. While I’ve long practiced yoga off and on, this time I launch myself full-force into the yogic way of living culminating with my first “hot yoga” class. A group of people wearing nearly no clothing crammed into a tiny room heated to 105 degrees - all the elements for hilarity and humiliation are in place.

Excerpts

Personal Essay: The Errand of Angels
“I bet you’re the kind of girl who doesn’t really get along with other girls.” He said it so coolly that my high-school self immediately knew the correct answer. “Oh yeah, all my best friends are boys,” I said obligingly. That wasn’t remotely true but even my then-self knew that we women are supposed borrow a friend’s lipstick in the bathroom and then use that same shade to mark her man in the bedroom. I added,”I’m not crazy like those other girls.” What I meant, of course, was that I was low-maintenance (lie), no-drama (lie) and that I’d be comfortable with burping, farting and sex jokes (which I kind of love, much to my parents’ chagrin).The boy in question was a crush and I wanted to impress him, even if it meant throwing another girl – or my entire gender – under the bus. Indeed all my best friends were then, and are still now, girls. Not that I don’t love and adore the men in my life but so much of my life revolves around my sisters, both those who share my DNA and those who don’t.

How do you ask for help when you don’t even know what it is you need? Tarragon chicken, roasted potatoes, green beans almondine, three different kinds of pie – she didn’t say anything as she placed dish after dish of lavish food on the tables, which was for the best as even if she had asked what I wanted, I would not have been able to answer her. When we decided to have a funeral for a baby no one knew in a place where no one knew us – grief makes familiars of us all – we hadn’t exactly thought out the details. Just making the arrangements to transfer our daughter’s body from the hospital to the funeral parlor proved enormous – in a strange trick of fate the State sent us her death certificate months before we got her birth certificate and we were left explaining over and over again how someone who hadn’t been born had died. So the fact that all our families were going to need to be fed after the funeral? Too enormous to comprehend. But there was Mandy, hand on her own pregnant stomach, dishing out not just food but a funerary feast. She stepped so lightly that I couldn’t even remember the moment that she had stepped in and carried my pain in her hands, just as adeptly as she carried the platter of crudities. Women carry so much more than babies.

How do you start a conversation that ends with “and now I have to go to court in another state to testify against him”? Melissa seemed to understand my inability to explain the reason I showed up unannounced at her door one day with my baby under one arm and a stack of legal documents under the other and instead watched quietly as our sons played and I filled out the forms outlining my case against my ex-boyfriend. Forms that I had tried to fill out for a solid week but every time I opened the packet in my silent home I was suffocated by all the things I couldn’t say but had to write. How do you write something you’ve never even admitted to yourself much less said out loud? It starts with not being alone. Even if she didn’t understand the haunted look in my eyes or the triplicate copies of pages that began “Under penalty of law…” she understood my need for company. Women hear so much more than what is spoken.

How do you talk about a nightmare? When the need to speak finally came, the story pressed behind my lips and I could no more hold it back than hold back vomit, Erika listened. She knew him in a way I hadn’t and that gave me the context with which to frame my own experience, her faith in my version of the events – a first. Then came my sister Laura who let me call her every day, sometimes many times a day,to recount one more memory I’d pushed away. The memories felt endless, my need to purge insatiable and yet she never flinched from the torrent. For months she listened. And then came all the girls – some of you girls, even – to wrap me in the protection of their stories and their arms. Girls who called when they heard a news story about sexual assault, to see if I was okay. Girls who called to ask if they were going to be okay. Girls who said they could talk about their stories because I could talk about mine. Women say so much more than what is spoken.

How do you say “I’m sad when I have every reason to be happy”? Weddings and baby showers. Births and deaths. Beauty and trauma. The large moments of our lives are emotionally etched into our being but what of all the myriad small moments? The day-to-day monotony, sometimes punctuated by a burst of rapid-fire baby giggles, sometimes overwhelmed by a string of gray days: Even though I am surrounded by tiny people – whom I deeply love – I have never known such loneliness as I have as a young mother. And just when I think I am about to go mad from the incessant irrational whining, Samantha and Debbie showed up at my door. They came bearing gourmet cheesecake (just because) to feed my stomach and stories to feed my soul. Women feed so much more than hunger.

How do you learn to accept your faults? “Charlotte, sit down. We’re done with our workout.” “Girl, get over yourself.” “You have gotten too thin.” And even a stage-whispered, “You have camel toe! Fix it!!” Over the years, Gym Buddies Allison, Megan and Krista, always just a hysterical text message away, have done so much more than keeping me from dropping the weight bar on myself. They rein me in, they ground me, they correct me and through it all they still love me. I am stronger because they do not treat me like shattered glass. Women temper so much more than tantrums.

How do you comprehend the eternal? Three years old, her large brown doll eyes welled up. Three is too young to understand death much less such an untimely death. I was 20 when my baby sister died – an entire lifetime apart from three – and yet I could barely wrap my mind around the fact that a person who is here one moment can be so utterly gone the very next. I watched my next-youngest sister Kathryn climb up the stool to sit on the kitchen counter so she could be eye level with her sisters, aunts, friends, her grieving mother. Taking all of us adults in, she stared solemnly, already forgetting the sister she barely knew. But some things run deeper than mere memory. Shared things like grief. Things like a tiny hand on my arm and then a tiny head on my shoulder as she sobbed. These were not crocodile nears nor were they shed out of fear or exhaustion or hunger, no she cried for one simple reason: the rest of us were crying and she cried with us, her heart-broken with ours. Even at three, women cry so much more than tears.

Women get a lot of bad press – if you believe the media, we’re catty, gossipy, back-stabbing competitive bitches. The Real Housewives of Wherever is pretty much based on this premise. Sometimes in our pettier moments we may even believe it ourselves: fearing other women’s successes and glorying in their failures. And gossiping about all of it. But we forget: This sisterhood – this is what we lose when make it about comparing waistlines, jobs or children, when we reduce the complexity of our relationships to the span of our thighs or the label on our bag, when we compete for things we’ve already lost. These “mom-petitors”, “”skinny bitches”, “drama queens” and fashionista social climbers – these are not the women I know. In the end, women are so much more than we give ourselves credit for. Women have the power to be angels.

When I talk about my Gym Buddies and TurboKick family, people often ask me if we’re always as hunky dory as we appear on my blog. Of course there’s drama. There are late-night phone calls, gossip, backstabbing, interventions, passive-aggressive Facebooking and one fight that had me sobbing in the parking lot on three separate occasions swearing to change gyms. But these are the exception. Even if I cared to remember these incidents, which I try not to, I have a rule that I only share my own dirt. And there’s certainly plenty of that to go around.

So I want to take this time to thank all the amazing, talented, big-hearted, beautiful inside-and-out women in my life – those I mentioned here and the many many more I didn’t have room to name. While it isn’t always rainbows and unicorns and PMS parties, the good I have received from you far outweighs the negative. If I had that high-school conversation to do over again I would say how proud I am to have such strong connections with so many strong women.