Smorgasbord Body = Positive Self-Image?

There's nothing more eye-catching than a rack of huge shoulders, a slab of muscular glutes or a set of ripped abs. They prove that you've got the strength, determination and stick-to-it-iveness to make your body the best it can be.

They also prove that you've got no social life and a trust fund or rich parents or something because the only way you'll get a body like that is to quit your job and spend 16 hours in a gym everyday.

In third-party perspectives, they saw this as a market for new magazine readers. I'm flabbergasted on the way they put the word "health" or "muscles" as their magazine's name. They're all bringing their readers articles each month that promote a robust, healty life: a healthy life for you by introducing new variations to your workout routine, and, by shamelessly re-packaging the exact same workout that the've run for the last 18 issue, a robust, healthy life for us.

But let's face it: if their workout advice were actually effective, why do they fill the magazine with page after page of ads for shady workout drugs and "Get-Huge-Fast-Without-Exercise" devices?

If each issue's requisire "healthy sex" article actually applied to you and could improve your love life, why do they always run an ad on the opposite page for a series of VCDs that promises to do the same thing?

If their monthly nutrition columns which tell you how fat and lose weight had any basis in reality, why are most of their advertisers hawking fat-burning pills and liposuction?

Why? Why do they manage to survive and people would still buying them? The answer is that they really know the formula that works, using the right combination of enthusiastic words and phrases; dubious, repetitive (and often dangerous) workout routines; and photos of good-looking men who do take care of their bodies.

For fellow slobs, a few issues of this type of magazine spread out on coffee table at home gives the impression that you're at least trying to take care of your body. For girlfriends of these guys, the magazine got lots of pictures of attractive men to peruse and think about later when your beau's making a feeble attempt to implement "Great Sex" tips on you.

I'll probably never get into that kind of smorgasbord body, for that matter. But so what! The inflated ego I experienced in my drug-induced college days has been replaced with something a lot less self-destructive: Self-importance fueled not by pushing my muscles to the limit at the gym, but by being proud of what I have now: a supermodel girlfriend!