I'm a bit of a gym bunny and I'm never away from the place. Unfortunately, I also happen to love chocolate more than life itself. This sad situation gave rise to a bit of a belly over the years which grew to an even bigger bit of a belly. Something needed to be done. With a tear in my eye, I locked up the chocolates and stocked up on boring old veggies and started counting the old calories.

As I say, I go to the gym, anyway, but while trawling various online nutrition and fitness forums, I kept seeing the name of this DVD popping up again and again. Some people were posting before and after pictures of the results that they'd got with it and these people were totally shredded! At a mere £4.99 on Amazon, I decided it didn't hurt to give it a go in addition to my other gym classes. The people on the forums were saying that the workouts were killer even though they only lasted 20 minutes, so I decided I could spare an extra 20 minutes a day for a bit of extra work.

I waited with trepidation for the DVD to arrive and popped it in the DVD player clad in nothing but lycra and spandex (that last part may be a lie as I'm not sure spandex could cope with my belly). I pressed play, listened to the introduction and then.....realised I needed weights! Grrr! So I had to make do with tins of beans for the time being and headed out to Argos for weights the next day. Nice cheap DVD, to be sure, but I spent double the price of the DVD on a set of weights in increasing sizes.

But back to the DVD. Jillian Michaels is well-known as the tough talking trainer from The Biggest Loser although in this DVD she isn't very tough talking (nor, in fact, does she do a great deal of training...she's far more interested in walking around showing off her perfectly sculpted abs). She also has two other little svelte disciples with her, one who is taking the easy option of the moves you have to do and one taking the hard option (so you have a wee choice to go with depending on how fit you're feeling/naturally lazy you are etc.). Her theory with 30 day shred is that you do a 20 minute work out which breaks down as follows:
-A Warm Up
-3 Minutes of Strength Training (where those weights come in handy)
-2 Minutes of Cardio
-1 Minute of Abs
You then repeat the strength, cardio and abs three times and finish with a cool down.

The DVD contains 3 workouts, each lasting 20 minutes but each supposedly increasing in difficulty. You are supposed to do one of these workouts for 30 days (or indeed, move up the work outs from Level 1 to Level 3 over the course of 30 days if you feel you can). At the end of 30 days you're meant to magically turn into Kate Moss....or something like that.

The thing is, I wouldn't know. Despite everyone online saying that the workout was hardcore, I found it rather easy. Even when I tried Level 2 and Level 3, I didn't find myself sweating buckets and dying with every attempt to breathe as people had assured me I would. As I say, though, I do do lots of cardio in the gym and have been doing so for 5 years, so perhaps the DVD is aimed more at people trying to break into exercise from a completely exercise-free lifestyle.

The other thing I found (which, to be fair, I've found with every exercise DVD I've ever owned) is that it is so damn boring. Doing the same routine, every day for 30 days....I think I'd end up carted away by the men in white coats! There's no good, pumping tunes in the background to get you going, there's no crowd of skinny minnies in the same room as you eyeballing you to see if you and your big fat backside can keep up with them (which I find is a very good motivation at the exercise classes at my gym), there's no instructor who can see you and see when you're standing around pretending to tie your hair back or fix your shoelace. It's a woman on the telly. That's it. And yes, I should have realised that before I bought the thing but hey, we all make mistakes!

On the plus side, it is only a mere 20 minutes. Everyone can find 20 minutes to work out. And to be fair, I think that it would be quite challenging for people who aren't used to doing a lot of fitness. Plus, I know a lot of people prefer to work out at home rather than face the eyeballings of the skinny minnies. So, maybe I'm being too hard on it. Maybe I should do the full 30 days and see if the magic works and I wake up a lean, mean, fighting machine.