You probably don't know my friend Sharon, but you know someone like her.
She's the girl who you see munching on birthday cake, eats fast food more than home cooked, and spends most of her time sitting on the couch crying over old movies.
She is also the girl that when she walks past, heads turn.
Sharon is the girl who can spend all day cleaning her house and not get tired.
She's the one who never says no to a long walk or helping a friend move.
She's the girl who doesn't cringe when summer comes and the swimsuits come out.
Sharon has a great body, a healthy body, and no one ever understood how she did it.
Her friends and co workers were baffled because they never saw her using the gym at work, never heard her talking about her workouts or counting her calories at lunch.
She was healthy, vibrant, and sexy and she apparently never lifted a finger to do it.
But I found out her secret.
Sharon DOES exercise, but she doesn't have a big set of weights or a weird looking fitness machine sitting in the corner of her room.
She doesn't pay $100 a month for a gym membership and she doesn't have to drive 20 miles to get to her workout room.
She does it all right in her bedroom.
The secret of Sharon's body isn't a secret at all.
We all know that if you want to get in shape you have to exercise.
We want to exercise but it is too much trouble and too expensive to do it right.
We don't have money coming out of our ears and we don't have a lot of time to fit a workout routine into our schedule.
So we don't exercise, not because it is too hard, not because we don't want to, but because it is too expensive and too much of a hassle.
In the back corner of Sharon's closet were a set of weird looking tubes with handles on them.
When I pulled them out she told me that those were her "resistance bands", that she exercises with.
I asked where the rest of the stuff she uses was and she said that was it.
All she uses is the resistance bands! Of course I didn't believe her, so she had to show me.
She showed me how she works her legs, her arms, her back, and even her core using a few simple pieces of rubber.
Sometimes she would hook the bands to the door knob and use it to do even more exercises.
I was amazed, she was working her whole body AND getting a good cardio burn all using nothing but rubber bands! What was even more amazing was that the exercises were simple to do.
Sure, they made her sweat, but she didn't have to struggle with weights, adjust machines, or read a long list of instructions just to do one exercise.
She moved from one exercise to the next in no time and told me that it only takes about 20 minutes to get a decent workout in.
I couldn't believe it.
Not only were the resistance bands easy to use, they are light weight and easy to just throw in the back of Sharon's closet when she was done.
She didn't have to step around some big machine.
She didn't have to plug anything in or move anything around.
When she wanted to take her bands with her on vacation, all she did was throw them in her suitcase! The big shock came when Sharon revealed that the whole set of bands and the book that came with it was less than $50.
That's less than a gym membership, and much less than the monthly payment on one of those big machines from the infomercials.