Fitness/Diet Articles are Irritating Me

What do you see whenever you are in the check-out line of a grocery store?  Magazines.  What headlines are publishers luring you into buying their magazines with?   "Drop Five Pounds by the Weekend"....."Get Your Body Ready for the Beach by June".......Get Toned Abs in 5 Minutes a Day....."The New Water Diet"....New Soup Diet"....."Easy Fitness Routine"....I am just making these up, but you get the idea.

Now, suppose you buy the magazine.  You get home and sit down with your afternoon snackie and turn right to the article, and it is a rehash of the last 25 articles you have read over the past year!  At least as you continually read the same tips on how to lose weight and get healthy over and over and over it might lodge in your brain and you might actually remember some of them when making food choices or when trying to get up off the couch.

Now, for my first irritation with these articles.  Have you looked at the "menu plans" for those diets?    Now, I am always eager for menu ideas, but I am beginning to feel like there must be a big database somewhere that the writers of these articles access for their menus....they are all just alike.  Every time I flip to the menu section of a diet I am so disappointed.  Nothing new.  Ever.  Now, I know these menus are simply meant as guides, but many readers want to follow an exact diet, written down.    Who on earth is going to have that huge variety of food for a week's menus in their kitchen....just think of the piles of leftovers?   But I guess any menu plan is better than seeing this at suppertime: 

Note: if you click on the link for the 3 Day Diet, you will find some interesting information.  It is an older article, but very current.  I got the picture from Bing.com.  All clip art is free, but every photo links you to its original source and you can file some neat web sites.

The other thing I am ranting about is the exercises recommended in some of the articles on fitness.  I was reading an article in a magazine recently about using yoga to get fit and help reverse aging.  Now I am a yoga fan and I do yoga and pilates for my exercise and I know how simple and safe and effective yoga poses can be.  However, if I wanted to try this yoga idea and was looking for something to do easy and safe, and the article only bothered to refer to headstands and plow pose, I would think "well that is a type of exercise I certainly cannot do".  The article was touting inverted poses to increase blood flow to the brain, something we could all use, Now, guess what, most everybody can lie on their backs and put their calves onto a coffee table, the bed, or sofa.  Or bend over toward your toes and "hang loose" for awhile.  Simple, easy, safe.  Now why can't the article recommend something simpler?????? I searched around and found this article for anybody interested in exploring simple yoga inversions.  Be warned:  the photo on the webpage is not what they will be teaching you to do, so read the article.

If you want to know more about easy yoga, this yoga website might be a good place to start.

Another article on getting fit quickly was amusing to me, although accurate.  When you analyzed the exercise regimen, they had designed exercises that exercised two parts of your body at the same time, cutting your exercise time in half.  Now that one was clever.  Every article usually contains one new nugget of information,  so I will continue to read diet articles and fitness articles, even thought they are repetitious.  You never know when you will have a new aha moment.