I am a devotee of Jillian Michaels' DVDs and On-Demand workouts. They're effective, yet not so awful or discouraging as to make me quit halfway. Recently I bulked up my home Jillian library and was examining the DVD covers when I realized that Jillian kinda...has exactly the same facial expression (not to mention body-halo) on every DVD cover. Yet if you've put the blood, sweat and tears into her workouts as I have, you can discern slight differences in each facial expression. Let's examine:

This was the first Jillian Michaels video I ever got. Can you see the glint in her eye? She's all, "Hi Claire. I'm Jillian. Get ready to get to know me well. We're going to be friends. Good friends. Heh heh heh." I can recite various parts of this video along with her and sometimes I have whole conversations with friends where we just quote lines from the videos. That is fear leaving the body.

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After I mastered the Shred I decided to buy this video. After I completed it in its entirety (usually only half of it is available on On Demand) and almost died, I realized that if I can master this video, I will be in pretty good shape. I ordered it and it sat on my shelf for about a month. Last night I unwrapped it and put it in my DVD player for my next workout. I was looking at Jillian's face on it which was what inspired me to write about her since her sassitude on it is almost unbearable. She's like, "Hey Claire! It's me again. Recognize this smirk? Yeah, I got your number. You did the Shred, did you? Well, you're not so special. What is special? The workout I've got in store for you. We'll see how funny you think it is to recite my lines."

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This workout is intense, and at times it makes me worry about Jillian's mental health. At one point she even contemplates working out her assistants so hard they have to go to the hospital. Hmm. Here I feel like Jillian looks leonine, satisfied and victorious, like our journey together is coming to a really significant place. I would say that she looks like she just finished eating an antelope, except I think she's a vegetarian, so I would say it looks like she finished eating a soy antelope, except that I know for some reason that she hates soy. So she looks like she just finished eating, I dunno, a barbell.

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To me, it seems like Jillian's not really into her smirk here. She's not smirking with her eyes. I think that she secretly doesn't like yoga that much. I don't like yoga that much either, so maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, but when I tried this video (only one time, via On Demand) it seemed like she was doing it really fast, so our heartrates would be up and we'd be panting and we'd be done with it sooner. Fun fact: same pants as in "6 Week 6 Pack Abs."

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Jillian just looks scary and mean here. Photo magic gone wrong. Is she sick of the gray pants? Does she know that America is going to fail to embrace the kettlebell the way the fitness equipment industry wants us to? This is the worst smirk yet, and I'm also not that big a fan of this workout anyway. Too much popping and locking, and not in the fun hip-hop way. My friend Bex and I agree that this workout always makes you feel like you're about to throw your dumbbell through your TV.

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What is going on here? Jillian is smiling with her teeth?! What caused this glitch? I'll tell you what's behind this: Jillian does kickboxing in this video, and she loves kickboxing. She refers to it as "her roots." So if you really want Jillian to smile, get her kick-punching.