Marianna Mazzeo, then 14, was keeping a painful secret that was growing more and more difficult to hide.

“I wanted to die,” she says. “But I didn’t think it was normal for a person in middle school to want to die.”

Mazzeo, now 20, says she was sexually abused by her uncle from the ages of 6 to 11 and spent most of her childhood struggling with her emotions.

After a suicide attempt as a teenager, she was put into a residential mental health facility that ultimately changed her life, she tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue.

One of the questions in the admissions paperwork asked: “Have you ever been touched in a way that you shouldn’t have?”

Seeing that, Mazzeo felt ready to open up about what happened to her as a child.

“It was split-second decision,” she says. “I said ‘yes’ because I wanted to be able to talk about it, to be able to finally heal from what was making me so upset all the time.”

• For more on Mazzeo’s journey of survival and healing and how she brought her uncle to justice, subscribe now to PEOPLE or pick up this week’s issue on newsstands now. 

In 2014, detectives in Marblehead, Ohio, questioned her uncle, Richard Rose, but he refused to take a lie detector test, thus ending the investigation due to lack of evidence, according to a police report obtained by PEOPLE.

While Mazzeo focused on managing her mental health, she never gave up on someday getting the truth from her tormentor.

RELATED: How 20-Year-Old Woman Got Her Alleged Abuser to Confess

“When I found out [the case was closed], I wrote in my journal, ‘He stole five years of my childhood that I’ll never get back,’ ” she says. “‘It’s not over. I’ll get a confession.’ “

Last year, Mazzeo was triggered when she saw a man who resembled Rose. She decided she could no longer live in the shadows and set out to expose the truth.

Eventually, after texting her uncle in an attempt to communicate, they scheduled a video chat on Facebook Messenger, and Mazzeo set up two cell phones: one for the call and another to record their exchange.

As soon as her uncle’s face appeared on her phone after eight years without seeing him, she hit record. He began to apologize and Mazzeo began to cry.

“I need to hear you say it,” she demanded. Finally, he did: “I’m sorry I molested you.”

With that crucial evidence in hand, Mazzeo went to the police.

On April 12, Rose, 57, was arrested in Port Clinton, Ohio, and awaits trial on five counts of rape, to which he has pleaded not guilty. He remains jailed with his trial scheduled for December.

His attorney did not return calls seeking comment.

Mazzeo, meanwhile, is living on her own for the first time, with support from her sensitive 2-year-old Labrador mix, Bane. She recently enrolled in college with hopes of becoming a psychiatric nurse…

You may have seen this funky-looking massage tool making the rounds on social media—celebs like Shakira and top athletes like three-time Olympian Kerri Walsh Jennings have posted glowing reviews of the TheraGun Professional Massager. The idea is to place the ball on sore muscles that need some TLC; pull the trigger and the ball will hammer away at 40-beats-per-second, manipulating and loosening tight spots.

Sounds awesome—but with the steep price tag, is it worth it? We had Health editors try it, and here’s what they said.

To buy: $600; amazon.com or theragun.com

“I take five SoulCycle classes a week, and my calves are chronically tight. I’ve tried everything from intensive stretching to acupuncture, but nothing has totally worked—until I tried this. After every class, I blasted my legs from ankle to upper thigh. Not only did I feel better, but I also found that I was able to perform better in my classes.” —Bethany Heitman, executive editor

“Some Theragun fanatics told me they prefer using it before a workout to warm them up, but I found it most effective after. I used it for about 10 minutes after an intense boot camp. It feels like a good, deep massage, and it left me feeling loosey-goosey—in a really good way!” —Arielle R. Franklin, senior contributing editor

“My husband and I work out six days a week, and by the end, we’re definitely a little tight. So we were both really excited to try this. I liked it, but my husband was even more into it. He lifts weights and found it useful in his recovery, plus he loved that it looks like a power tool. I’d say it’s totally worth the cost if you work out regularly." —Heather Muir Maffei, beauty director

Your time is precious — and limited. So when it comes to working out, it’s not uncommon to wonder: what exercise burns the most calories?

Exercise scientists have rigorously studied the amount of energy people expend during different types of exercise, and they’ve determined which workouts are best for burning calories. The thing to keep in mind: the more muscles you engage and the harder (and longer) you push those muscles, the more energy your body will churn through, says Dr. Tim Church, an exercise researcher and a professor of preventative medicine at Pennington Biomedical Research Center at Louisiana State University. So in order to maximize the number of calories you’ll burn, “you want an exercise that uses both lower and upper body muscle groups and is performed at a high intensity,” Church says.

You might therefore expect something along the lines of CrossFit or Tabata-style interval training to burn the most calories. And you may be right.

A study on one popular CrossFit workout called the “Cindy” — in which a person does a series of pull-ups, push-ups and squats in as many rounds as possible — found that it burned an average of 13 calories per minute. The workout lasts 20 minutes, so exercisers burned an average of 260 calories in total. While perfect apples-to-apples studies aren’t available, some Tabata research has shown that one of these workouts — composed of 4-minute training blocks that mix maximum-intensity bouts of resistance and aerobic training with short periods of rest — burns 14.5 calories per minute, or 280 calories during a 20-minute workout.

These per-minute calorie averages beat out many traditional forms of exercise. “But there’s such a variety within these classes and the people doing them that scores are all over the map,” says John Porcari, author of the Tabata study and a professor of exercise and sports science at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse. For example, some people in his Tabata study burned up to 360 calories during the 20-minute workout, or 18 calories per minute.

Yet “per-minute” calorie burn isn’t always the best way to assess a workout’s energy demands, Porcari says. The total time spent training and a person’s willingness to stick with a workout are also important factors. “You can crank like the dickens for 30 seconds and burn a lot of calories,” he says. So if you’re extremely short on time, high-intensity interval training (HIIT) is probably your best option. But in the real world, Porcari says, many people won’t be comfortable (or capable of) engaging in regular or extended bouts of high-intensity training.

He says a “more fair” way to assess an exercise’s true energy demands is to ask people to do it at a pace that is comfortable for them. And when it comes to vigorous, calorie-burning exercises that people are comfortable doing for extended periods of time, running usually comes out on top…