Gluttons Club

So I have two female roommates and often they leave women's magazines laying around the place. Unfortunately, most of them are celebrity gossip rags that actually raise my blood pressure and make me ashamed to be human but there's always the occasional cosmo, glamour or other crap that at least has good pictures and entertainingly weird articles. Recently though, I picked up Shape magazine and was appalled by the contents. A quick browse gave the appearance that it exists just to make women feel bad about themselves.

A multi-volume lexicon could begin to address the issue of women and their self awareness and I'm no expert but this mag is blatantly bad. The content seemed geared towards creating a lifestyle bereft of pleasures from consumption in favor of rigidly controlling ones intake, habits and pleasures in the name of a small tummy and cute outfits. As a dude, I'm supposed to be all in favor of hot, fit chicks but as a foodie, I'm completely unnerved by the lack of sense in many of the advice given. If one were to base their life on this mag, rice cakes, fruits, veg and spring water would be all that you ate in-between workouts you perform while wearing cute outfits. Your sex life would be without passion and might actually be regimented for maximum calorie burn and you'd have to find a job where stress is either non-existent or yoga is readily available to combat it.

If one were to follow every tip in the magazine, your life would be regulated in a manner that would frighten Orwell. One of the letters to the editor illustrates this as the writer complains that in a single issue, there is conflicting advice over how often to work out. One article recommends taking a day off in between, another reccomends taking just one day off a week. As the response clarified, the poor reader didn't know that she was supposed to follow just one workout regimen at a time, writing: "I am disappointed that such a reputable magazine would provide the contradictory information about abdominal exercises..." This reader was naive enough to take each article as gospel, dedicated enough to try to follow each word of advice and serious enough about getting results that she wrote the letter. Having read enough of this issue, I can only understand her confusion and anguish.

Consider the following feature article, "7 diet Rules You Must Break." A few of the rules are:

-"If it's mealtime, you should eat--even if you're not hungry." The comments that follow include the following tip to help break this rule, "maintain a hunger journal along with your food diary." I once thought about a food diary but it was to help me remember especially good meals I've had, not revolve my life around caloric intake. According to this, recording what you ate isn't good enough, you also need to record when you were hungry. Do you use the same notebook or get a separate one? Should it be lined or blank? What colors would be best to match my cute outfits? Oh, and speaking of contradiction, later in this article a sidebar appears with rules you should "really" live by. Number one is to eat breakfast daily. But what if I'm not hungry?

-I shouldn't waste food when others in the world are starving. If that is your justification for over-eating, you don't need a magazine, you need a doctor.

-Never refuse food offered to you by well-meaning hosts. This is my favorite. The dangers, it says, is that "giving in at work, family gatherings or home led to taking in just 500 extra calories a week, your weight could increase by .5 pound per month." (month is italicized, grammar is questionable) I'm sorry but is half a pound a month really that serious? The payoff between enjoying oneself with friends and family, respecting the effort others put in to provide tasty treats for you and, forbid the thought, actually taking pleasure from eating is worth half a frickin' pound. Spend an extra half hour at the gym or doing crunches in your cute outfit if need be but don't limit your enjoyment because you're worried about a few ounces that may occur if you're not eternally vigilant. The advice to break this rule is even more absurd: "Find ways to bond with people in your life that don't revolve around food. For example, celebrate a birthday with a sunrise hike or by participating in a 5k run to benefit your favorite charity." I'm beyond comment at this point.

So, to sum up, I don't understand women. If this is what women read and take advice from, I'd be surprised if women understood women or even their own motivations. In fact, I think the editors of this magazine are purposefully trying to confuse women in order to increase the sale of cute exercise outfits. After all, the best reason to follow a draconian, self-imposed diet and exercise regimen is to fit into the cute outfits that are featured in each workout feature. They are just the cutest!