Duh!

Lawrence Toppman

I was in the supermarket buying locally grown blueberries yesterday -- those always taste better to me -- and I noticed that every one of the advice-oriented magazines mentioned a weight-loss story on its cover.

Not most of them. ALL of them, and I counted eight.

Now, this is lunacy. All of us know that the three things needed to lose weight are proper portion size, intelligent choice of foods and regular, fat-burning exercise. Anyone who thinks there's a magical key no one has found before might as well search for it in the land where unicorns roam.

That's why I don't post discourses on my menus and exercise schedules on this blog. Instead, I try to meditate on what it means to be overweight, to be tempted, to be valiant in the struggle or to backslide into shame (but not too deeply).

Of course, it's also true that men and women have been attracted to each other for the same reasons since leopard-skin loincloths were the rage, yet these magazines run monthly stories about luring the ideal mates. So I guess P.T. Barnum's dictum about suckers remains as true today as when he said it.