Shapely Secrets

I've been all revved up the past few days to write about a new TV obsession (which is quite significant because I don't watch much TV), but I saw an infomercial I HAD to write about first. It's actually still on, but I felt myself trying to remember all the key components so I rushed in here.

Side note: It's important to my pride that it be known that I have never bought anything from an infomercial. The only exception was when I was little, like 6, I begged my parents to buy me the Frankie Valli silver greatest hits album (it was actually a collection of albums). I wanted it so bad, mostly for the song Big Girls Don't Cry. I was totally shocked when they bought it for me because I had never known them to buy things from TV...and they still don't. I think there was one other incident of TV infomercial buying when my equally-persuasive little sister simply could not live without a food dehydrator. My reasoning for why I needed this set of records must have been fairly compelling, and to this day I'm pretty touched when I think of them calling to order these records for a little kid.

Anywho, so the product at hand is a weight loss program that promises a loss in 1-2 dress sizes in 14 days. I'm expecting some little machine, or pills, or maybe even videos. Then this strangely shaped thin women in bad jeans comes on to explain what we all want (these are as she stated them): 1. Fast results 2. Weight loss as fast as possible 3. Weight loss with as little effort as possible. Let's ignore the redundancy of 1 and 2. Women in the ad came up one by one to tell their stories. There were tears and shocked shrieks as they realized they'd lost 9 inches from their thighs...or 1, 2 or 3 dress sizes! Amazing.

I chuckled a little, thinking of my sweaty sessions at the YMCA, and the heart-healthy benefits from said sessions. She continues by explaining that in 7 minutes a day, yes I said 7, I can lose two sizes with "motionless" exercise. I'm all for isometric exercises and all, in fact some of my weightlifting sets include them. But this program, it's got to be created by a genius! One can either stand up or sit down. There are specific activities done while still (they didn't show them on the program because I'm sure it would become all the rage and nobody would buy the tapes because they'd already swiped them from the program), and allegedly work 5 muscle groups at a time and work "muscle-to-muscle" (ok, I've been working out since I was quite young, I have no clue what that means).

Let's say this program does actually work. Is there any other benefit to these "exercises"? Perhaps increased tone, cardio, strength? Or maybe it will make me sleep better or feel less depressed? Even though these women got me really excited about their results - I think the Y is where I'll continue to go (wow, I'm really a sucker, I could be getting these same results in only 7 minutes a day).