Health and Fitness
Let's face it; health and fitness are extremely important. It is a lot easier to enjoy life when you are healthy. That's not to say that if you are experiencing health issues that you can't enjoy yourself, but if you have your health, you are very lucky. That is why health and fitness magazines are so very popular. There are dozens of magazines devoted to health and fitness. Many specialize in diet, exercise and physical training and others are for sports enthusiasts. Here is a Top 5 list of health and fitness magazines and what they have to offer.
1. Prevention Magazine – This is one of my favorite magazines. It is a monthly periodical that is smaller than other magazines but only in size. Prevention offers numerous articles on health and fitness in short quick little bites that keep you hungry for more. From beginning to end, Prevention is filled with medical info, health and beauty tips, super-informative articles and healthy recipes. If you want information on it, Prevention has it. Smart ways to live well is Prevention's motto and it is very fitting because it is one smart magazine. One of my favorite sections of Prevention is the Letter from the Editor. Liz Vaccariello always gives a very personable letter that details the current issue and how it relates to the lives of her readers. Prevention is a bargain at 16.97 for a year subscription. The magazine also has a website with hundreds of tips and interactive tools to keep you happy and healthy at www.prevention.com.
2. Women's Health Magazine – Women's Health is another health and fitness publication that I enjoy. This is a standard sized magazine that is colorful, informative and very cutting edge. It is for the everyday woman who may be a wife, mother, student, and/or executive who loves to take care of herself. The articles are very well written and many of them touch on topics that people think about but don't often talk about such as skeletons in one's sex closet. I can always count on Women's Health for an in-depth interview with a hot celebrity who shares their health and beauty secrets. The magazine also features fat-blasting workout moves on tear off cards that you can take with you to the gym or post on your wall at home. Women's Health costs $11.97 for a 10-issue subscription plus $2.97 for delivery. Your subscription also comes with a free gift. To order, go to www.womenshealthmag.com.
3. Men's Health Magazine – This magazine which is tailored for male readers is comparable to Women's Health in that it is colorful and informative. Every now and again, I will take a sneak peek at a copy if my sweetie puts it down long enough. This is his favorite magazine. The articles are always fresh and exciting which they would have to be to keep most men interested. I love the Eat This Not That section because it gives tips on the types of foods and brands you should be eating, versus those that you should avoid. Men's Health also features relationship advice, an abdominal cruncher workout, style tips and a question and answer section that is always appealing. The magazine is a little pricier than others costing $19.90 plus $4.97 for delivery, but its well worth it to keep men healthy, stylish and well-informed. Men's Health also has an awesome website at www.menshealth.com.
4. Fitness Magazine – Fitness Magazine is for the Mind, Body and Spirit. With this publication, I can always count on a beautiful cover. It is not just the cover that is outstanding, the magazine is great too. Of course, fitness is the main objective of this periodical, therefore, you can find all types of workouts to slim down, tone up and work that booty. Fitness magazine has tips to help you look great from head to toe and everywhere in between. My favorite section is I did it. This chronicles stories of real life women who have beaten the battle of the bulge and how they lost the weight. Fitness magazine is a great read and readers are even tweeting about their mag. You can check them out at www.twitter.com/fitnessmagazine or visit the magazine's website at www.fitnessmagazine.com. Fitness magazine costs $16.97 for a full year.
5. Arthritis Today – Since arthritis runs in my family, I subscribed to Arthritis Today. I wanted to have as much info as possible on the ailment so that I wouldn't have to suffer like my grandmother (See AC Article: Arthritis is such a pain). Imagine my surprise when I received a magazine that not only gave me tips for coping with and preventing arthritis, but also articles on health and fitness and low fat recipes. Arthritis Today is packed with remedies to fight the inflammation of arthritis as well as exercises to walk off the weight and keep those joints moving, in addition to mature articles on exercise safety and nutritious snacks. A one year (6 issues) subscription to Arthritis Today is $12.95. You can order it at www.arthritistoday.org
All five of these magazines are filled from cover to cover with ways to keep your mind, body and soul healthy. Be sure to take some time to check them out at your local bookstore, library, newsstand or online. Trust me; your health will thank you. Happy Reading!
Sources:
Current Copies of: Arthritis Today, Fitness Magazine, Men's Health, Women's Health, Prevention Magazine and personal knowledge.
If you received an email from BlackBerryItalia late last night please ignore or delete it. The company that powers the BerryReview store, Mobihand, sent out an email newsletter last night to promote heath and fitness apps and ran into an issue. Many of the emails sent out were branded with the BlackBerryItalia logo to BerryReview Store customers who had opted in for the newsletter along with other sites like BlackBerryCool and CrackBerry. Mobihand has let us know that they have fixed the issue and they have taken steps to make sure it does not happen again.
I did not think this was worthy of an article until PU told me that he was worried that his information was compromised or sold. So I am writing this to confirm and assure you that both BerryReview & Mobihand value your information and that information has not been compromised or sold.
Now back to our regularly scheduled programming…
On “Pseudo-Fitness” Magazines And Eating Disorders
The hypocrisy of women's “health” magazines becomes fairly obvious just by looking at their covers. For example, this month's Self magazine features one cover line, “Be Happy And Healthy At Any Size” tucked below a much larger cover line:
“3 Easy Ways To Lose Weight.”
As Katie Drummond of True/Slant notes, “psuedo-fitness” magazines are “like heroin for the eating disordered. They often offer misleading diet information, along with airbrushed photos of impossible physical ideals, and perpetuate ugly myths about how health ought to look. It's obvious that these monthly doses are hurting us – but we can't help shell out for our next fix.” Drummond, like myself, is in recovering from an eating disorder, and is careful to note that while these magazines don't cause EDs, they don't do much to perpetuate a healthy body image, either.
We already know Self editor Lucy Danziger's take on her own publication, as she notes that photoshop is used to “inspire women to want to be their best.” By “their best,” naturally, she means, “their thinnest.” But Drummond's issues aren't with Danziger at this point—they're with current Shape magazine cover model Katharine McPhee, who posed for the magazine “airbrushed and in a bikini,” despite her past, public struggle with bulimia. Drummond is understandably sympathetic to McPhee's struggles, but notes that “after purging as often as seven times a day, for five years, you'd think McPhee would know better than to perpetuate the very same unrealistic physical ideal she admits to struggling with…I'm not faulting McPhee for wanting to celebrate her health and recovery. But I am faulting her for doing it in a way that's likely going to do more harm than good for other women.”
Sometimes I think those of us who have struggled with eating disorders have a radar that non-eating disordered people don't have: for Drummond and myself, seeing a confessed bulimic in a bikini on the cover of a fitness magazine, surrounded by articles on how to blast fat and cut calories, sets off a ton of alarm bells: the entire push of magazines like Shape and Self is that thin=healthy, and that weight loss=fitness, two very warped ideas of both health and body image that are dissected pretty handily during ED treatment. It's a tough call to make, honestly, regarding McPhee: on one hand, you have to give her credit for feeling confident enough in her body to open up to a health magazine, but on the other hand, it's pretty infuriating—not at McPhee, mind you, but at the illness in general—that she's standing amongst a sea of “lose weight now,” and “drop that ab flab” bullshit.
That said, Katharine McPhee is not the Queen of Eating Disorder Recovery, and as with any recovering anorexic or bulimic, the choices she makes to continue along a healthy path are her own. But I'm with Drummond in that I find it both sad and irritating that someone who knows the disease, it's triggers, and the media bullshit that surrounds it would willingly participate in the promotion of skewed health and body image ideals, something that's troubling not only for ED sufferers who may be reading McPhee's article, but also for McPhee herself: “As anyone who has recovered from an eating disorder knows,” Drummond writes, “the last thing – the very last thing – one should focus on is their bikini body, and, by extension, their weight or their size.”
Drummond admits that she hasn't read the full interview with McPhee, and I'll freely admit that I won't read it, either. The last time I bought a Self or a Shape, I was relapsing, hard. I didn't look at them as “fitness” magazines as much as I looked at them as “diet” magazines. They may be okay for some people, but for those of us who view the world through eating disordered brains, they're just a pile of dangerous bullshit, a perpetuation of all of the lies our illnesses want us to believe. I eat right for my brain, for my body, for my overall health. I exercise for the same reasons. I don't do it to fit into a fucking bikini. Life, and health, is about so much more than dropping a dress size.
A Lesson In Health Hypocrisyy: Katharine McPhee And Shape
Jessica Alba Covers “Self Magazine”
Send an email to Hortense, the author of this post, at commenters@jezebel.com.