Why Your Magazine Wants You to Fail

I don’t necessarily believe that the editors at Fitness, Self, Shape, etc. are deliberately trying to sabotage everyone’s self image. Obviously they present a picture of trying to improve it. But promoting everlasting change in the way women feel about themselves and their bodies would eventually lead to the loss of readership. After all, if we were entirely happy with ourselves, why would we buy a magazine based on making us all thinner, sexier, more tone, more beautiful, etc. You can see the contradictions on the covers and with every turn of the page.

When I saw this issue of Fitness magazine, naturally I was interested in the article about loving your body at any size. So I opened it up and looked at the table of contents for the article. They have an “On the Cover” section for quick reference to the cover stories. But there is nothing about “Love Your Body” anywhere to be found. So I go through the whole magazine page by page looking for the article, thinking I must be crazy. Finally I come across an article titled “25 body & beauty things you should stop obsessing about.” This is the article they are featuring on the cover, where Fitness “pulls back the fitting-room curtain to expose what it is about shopping that inspires and intimidates us.”

They go on to suggest we start “loving our bodies at any size — for real.” When you turn the page, you see mostly graphics, pictures and statistics about how much we don’t like our bodies. Tell me something I don’t know. But there is nothing — other than their mandate — that suggests we love our bodies, much less how to go about doing it. Certainly if it were as easy as making the decision to do so, wouldn’t we all choose to love our bodies as they are?

This is not to say there is nothing redeeming about women’s magazines. They offer a lot of good content that I can appreciate, often featuring women that serve as role models for us all and deserve recognition, and I love the recipes my magazines feature. But it’s frustrating that on one page we are being encouraged to “love our bodies” and the next 5 pages feature a woman in a bikini showing us how to “look good in a tank top” by doing these exercises. (They don’t mention the part about cutting calories.) And if that’s not bad enough, then you see ads for getting rid of belly fat by taking little pills, or enhancing your breasts with this cream or that, or get a better sex life by buying this video. If the main features of these magazines aren’t counterproductive, their advertising certainly is. Even when the ad isn’t specifically for “enhancing” our own appearance, you are still likely to see the societal ideal of a woman (most likely photoshopped into perfection) advertising everything from a kitchen stove to a vacation on a cruise. If you’re not ready to cancel your subscription quite yet, then I implore you to take everything with a grain of salt and remember that you are beautiful the way you are. Any quick fixes they suggest don’t promote lasting changes and lead to further frustrations which diminish our self esteem.