Fat Foodies and Skinny Yogis
Lifestyle mags for middle-agers are really kind of boring.
The magazine rack at my local Barnes & Noble is a miraculous place. From one end to the other, we can see all the myriad lifestyles of Twenty-first Century Americans laid out in subject and gendered order. We start out with gender-neutral political and current-events publications, move onto music and film; traverse across the Women’s Domains (crafts beauty, homemaking, food and health) to the men’s world of woodworking, computers, comics and half-naked women. (The naked ones are on the high top shelf, wrapped in plastic so that the teen-aged men don’t get any funny ideas.)
Which always makes me wonder why we don’t have half-naked men on the top most shelf of the women’s section….
But I digress….
For some time now, I’ve been troubled by the aging out of women from fashion magazines. You will know when you’ve finally aged out when you look at who’s on the cover and have zero idea of what she’s done to get there. Sure, I may know that Zendaya is a Disney Network starlet of some talent, but I’ve never seen her work. And who would have thought that Demi Lovato, who has some connection to the Jonas Brothers (or *a* Jonas Brother) would be taking up so much cover space on the fashion mags?
It’s when you realize your formerly favorite fashion magazines are now in a contest to court a much-younger generation that you understand: perhaps you’ve finally aged out of their prized demographic.
It can be a sad time indeed, in front of the crafts and adult coloring books….
As I sat there on that bench, perusing a crochet pattern magazine, I realized that right past the beauty and decorating mags was an entire rack devoted to the next phase of life, with lifestyle advice that could take most of us well into our old age. There’s just one thing about this, or shall I say two things: the topics of these mags are either food (from a gastronome perspective) or health (from the fitness perspective.)
No longer do the food and lifestyle magazines focus on losing weight or family meals in 20 mins or less. Now it’s about the long, leisurely five-course meal topped with good wine and a fantastic dessert. It is about the palate, not the waistline. The indulgence, not the diet.
It’s about being a Foodie — and damn the torpedoes otherwise.
I’ve always hated the term “Foodie.” It sounds like something a kid would say. Worse, it sounds not like someone who appreciates food, but someone who consumes food for mostly emotional reasons. “Foodie” makes me uncomfortable. Even though I’m one of those people who really enjoys food, I don’t attach strong emotions to it. I certainly don’t attach enough emotions to it to want to immerse myself in “Foodie” lifestyle magazines.
The flip-side of that lifestyle coin is the Health & Wellness magazines. I can’t begin to tell you how I hate the word “Wellness” too. It reeks of something New Agey that left my life when I turned my grunge wardrobe in to the Salvation Army. “Wellness” has been incorporated into the lexicon of healthcare billing departments, so Health & Wellness it is! This is the more hip of the two middle-age lifestyle choices, with smiling, thin middle-aged models in athleisurewear on the covers. Lots of stretchy yoga pants, tank tops and serene smiles. The stories inside, too, are a bit more with it, talk about how one can super-charge one’s sex life or where to find the best Bikram yoga retreats. In these mags, everyone runs or does yoga, has great sex, eats slimmingly filling meals, and balances their medications with their moods. They give us license to hang out all day in yoga pants, even if we don’t do yoga at all!
Still, I am as uncomfortable with these magazines as I am with the Foodie mags. Maybe it’s just not where I’m at in life. Maybe I’m not one of *those* people, of either lifestyle persuasion. Maybe at this point in my life, I don’t need style or makeup or decorating or meal-making advice (although a new recipe and change of curtains go a long way to sprucing up a fusty kitchen.)
Maybe it’s that, as we middle age, we don’t need those magazines the way we once did. There’s no desperate or urgent need to be swan-thin and perfect like Women’s Fitness tells us we can be. Maybe we’re not paranoid about those first few wrinkles anymore, and New Beauty can’t help us out (we’re not buying any of nonsense.) Sure, a prescription for super-charging our sex lives would be great — but maybe the importance of sex isn’t as primary as it was 30 years ago, when hormones were running high. Maybe we are at the point where we actually *do* know it all when it comes to sex: every position, every iteration, every whatever, to the point where we can say “oh, yeah, that’s what the kids are calling it now, but it’s the same old thing…”
So, I buy myself another crocheting mag while my husband buys another house repair mag. We may be the aging eyeballs that the Foodie and Wellness magazines desire, but we’re not ready to make a fetish out of what we eat or how we burn it off. I guess we’d just rather work with our hands.
☞ Tish Grier is a freelance writer, 20-minute meal maven, and crochet artisan. She lives in the bucolic western frontier of the People’s Republic of Massachusetts.
