Truth be told though, I received an email today from a lovely women over at Readers Digest, advising me that a comment I emailed in response to an article in the June edition of HEALTH SMART magazine is being printed in their next publication!
Muscle Man's first response was "Cool, do you get paid". My response "No dear, this is not the Mere Male section in the Women's Weekly, but if you want a cash payment for my thoughts, give me some ammunition".
Anyway, the email prompted me to re-read the article and familiarise myself with why I liked it enough to send off one of those sappy "I simply love your magazine" emails. You know the kind, dripping with sweet insincerity and unashamedly pleading for the letter of the month prize - which let's face it - am I the only one who is totally over Avon's Anew line?
Anyway, the article, titled "Scare Tactics" by Jean Kitson was an amusing, honest and witty diatribe (no wonder I loved it). I'll quote some hilarity below.
...I have a health regime of gym three times a week, followed by coffee. Sometimes, (isn't modern life busy) I go straight to coffee, which is where my gym buddy found me wondering what more I could do to improve my health.
She laughed so much she had to bend over and cross her legs.
"Your favourite exercise is sleeping in. You think a balanced diet is if your coffee and chocolate croissant don't slip off your tray. You forget to eat lunch and you always have more than one glass of wine with your dinner, which is often pork spare ribs".
I was gobsmacked!
This mockery came from a women who eats for breakfast homemade organic Bircher muesli with hand-ground organic almonds and chopped organic apple, with a cup of organic echinacea tea! Her colon may have biceps, her naval actually makes contact with her backbone when she smiles, and she looks younger than her teenage daughter, but I don't call her attitude healthy.
...I blame her false sense of superiority on the health-scare industry, specifically the "food frighteners" division.
...I work with an otherwise sane women, who puzzles me. There isn't a food group this women hasn't given up in a panic at some time or other,
and taken up again in a panic when she needed it to stay alive. She's dropped carbs, taken up nothing but carbs, dropped carbs between 3.45am and 3.58am, but only under a full moon after sacrificing a goat.Her food pyramid consists of a vast monolith of fear with a tiny topping of loathing.
We need a healthy balance in our thinking about diet. ...For all the billions of alarming words written about health, and all the government scare campaigns and witch-hunts and glossy guilt trips, they have collectively DONE BUGGER ALL to improve the health of Australians.
They do have some impact. Many health promotions have led to anxiety, neuroses, anorexia, bulimia, depression, poor self-image, malnutrition, scurvy, binge eating, seven sorts of fatigue syndrome, and mountains of untouched little plastic salads in McDonald's.
...diet has become such an obsession that we can't go out for a meal without weighing up the kilojoules, cholesterol, fat and sugar content, and regarding the menu as a personal insult.
There is even a health promotion day warning us against health promotions. It's called 'International No Diet Day'. You can just hear people in Somalia or Congo saying, "International No Diet Day? What, again?".
Why don't we just lighten up and call it Why Not Pig Out Day? or Eat whatever You Like Day? or simply Binge Day? I'll tell you, it's because the food frighteners don't want us to lighten up, in any sense, or we might realise that there is no goblin lurking in the fridge that we cannot cheerfully, personally, control.
This is only a small extract of this fabulous article. To read more you might have to spend 10 minutes in the newsagents pretending to scan the magazines whilst you read this article (page 74). You could be incidentally squeezing your butt cheeks together at the same time - which I have read is great for toning your derriere (wish I could personally vouch for it's success, but alas, no butt squeezing in newsagents for me - trust me though, I NEED TO!).
I can't really for the life of me recall what my exact response was but I am confident it was along the lines of "Great article, loved it, can I have some Avon Anew please?".
With all sincerity though, I did think it was a great read. We are a society that is driven by the latest "diet", or the need to "diet". Surely, any recognition that we need to relax and focus on a healthy LIFESTYLE is worth a veiled attempt at "Letter of the Month" right? :o)
Disclaimer: Health Smart magazine offers no prize for letter of the month (tight arses).
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