If a foreigner were to ask me about how I feel to be an American, I’d sit them down and show them some of these videos. I’d explain to them that because of things like this, during every Olympics, World Cup, World Baseball Classic and war, I never feel the same national pride that others do. Now, I know that there are infomercials and many of these same products in other countries, but they always seem to gain popularity and flourish here. If it doesn’t embarrass you to turn on the television and see this idiocy (proof that our nation is becoming an “Idiocracy”) then you probably are a fitness liberal and either buy these products yourself or support them. If so , then you’re also the sort of person who thinks that the words “exercise” and “plan” should be grouped together.
The reality is, as I’ve said many times before, most truly important tasks that have an ongoing goal, like parenting, cleaning, earning a living and fitness, are all things that would make us feel silly if we charted and planned them. Imagine the “Furniture Confusion” method of cleaning your house, or the “Intense Paperwork Interval” method at the office. Most of the things that as adults we should naturally handle because we’re trained on the proper methods as children, they require less of a grand scheme and more daily enrichment. People who are bad parents or poor workers or who keep filthy homes are lacking the same childhood enrichment that those who struggle with fitness display.
The same way good parents and clean families balk at out-of-control children and ants and cockroaches in other homes, fit people think the same ways of fat people. When they see these types of infomercials, they burst into laughter the exact same way people with clean homes laugh at the same types of infomercials for cleaning products. It’s the same way I laughed at my own mother when she told me she’d bought ‘P90X.’ She’s also bought ‘Power 90,’ which is the same thing without yoga, ‘Escape Your Shape’ a program full of charts and measuring trinkets, and a bunch of other things that haven’t worked. She’s in her fifties now. I wish I could get her to stop thinking so superficially, maybe then she’d stop buying these things and start doing some of the right things for her body. So that shows that I’m generally on my own with this one. Too many people out there are looking for something that doesn’t exist. There are no easy or fun ways out of cleaning your home, parenting, or anything else that’s wildly important to our society being better on a whole. Why should personal fitness be anything different?
The fitness company, Beachbody has a good racket, or idea in the infomercial world. They understand the male and female bodies that the masses think are attractive. Most think that monstrous body builders and emaciated models aren’t attractive and are too extreme, so Beachbody’s infomercial models are lean, fit men and women with flat stomachs and round butts. They wear things that not only highlight their shape, but that especially highlight how different they look from other fitness models and how similar they look to regular, fit people. To their credit, following Beachbody’s programs will give you these same bodies, but for one, so will any basic exercises done at great intensity, and two, if people could really complete the programs, then they’d be fit, and wouldn’t need the programs.
We should all feel shame when we see these things, knowing that something so simple as activity needs to be sold to be executed. In my opinion, the fact that we have to be told how to exercise, how to eat, how to be cleaner, how to conserve makes us living in this time a black mark on modern society and a people lost on the true definition of the word ‘civilization.’
