The best New Year’s Resolution you can make: stop reading magazines.
Tabloids, “Housekeeping” and even “Fitness” magazines are all built on the same template:
1. A cover photo that makes you feel bad about yourself
2. A headline that promises to “solve” your “problem”
3. An impossibly-long list of “secrets” or “tips”
4. Ads.
5. Ads.
6. Ads.
These are true for Men’s magazines, too; the shaming/solution loop is just more subtle. They prey on your inadequacies to sell you catalogues of things to buy. It’s a formula.
This is why “thigh gap” exists, and why I had to learn what a “bikini bridge” is yesterday. Both are ridiculous creations by magazine writers invented to make you feel bad about yourself. There will be more to follow. No one worried about the space between their thighs before it was invented by salesman. So why do we care?
Emotional frailty. We’re vulnerable. We feel like we’re not good at anything; that we fail often. And this is what we’re sold, because that’s what keeps us buying. We have no “willpower.” We’re “weak.” We must be “helped” by salesmen like Dr. Mehmet Oz, because we’re all victims. At least, according to Dr. Phil.
Enter CrossFit.
The average CrossFit athlete knows more about fitness and health than Jillian Michaels. Every female CrossFitter knows how squats affect their body: it gives them a butt. And every male CrossFitter knows that abs come from eating real food, not “Six-Pack Secrets” workouts. And they all know how to be good at something.
Some are good at deadlifting. Others excel at conditioning workouts. Still others are experts on eating. And some are just great at showing up every day and doing work. Any and all are better than “thigh gap.”
Here’s a real resolution: start working out today. Ten minutes, twenty; half an hour with a coach, or a full class. Learn something. If you don’t have weights to lift at home, pack up every magazine you own into garbage bags, and carry them outside. Squat with them; pick them up from the ground and press them overhead 30 times. Throw them. Carry them around the yard. Leave them outside to freeze for tomorrow’s workout. It’s the only way they’ll make you feel good instead of bad about yourself, and the only way they’ll ever improve your fitness.
How do you start? Book a No-Sweat Intro with a coach here. No charge, no sales pressure, not ever.
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