11 diet foods that are diet foods for very limited reasons!

Ever since becoming married, I have access to a lot more magazines geared towards women. I have a love/hate relationship when it comes to things marketed directly towards the female demographic. For example, my friend Diana got me hooked on the cereal Special K. It was like crack to me during the later high school years, especially the ones with strawberries. It's good and rumored to be somewhat nutritious, so what was there not to love?

At first, Special K seemed pretty innocuously gender neutral. It was just a white box with a giant red K and the obligatory close up shot of cereal landing into milk with the consistency of Elmer's glue. Nothing too bad about it. But then it started to change. The box began to take on a pinkish hue. And then it started to support the cure for breast cancer.

Now, I'm all about finding the cure for breast cancer. But does it have to be so blatantly directed towards the female audience? There is nothing less manly than shopping with your friends and they're all throwing in the 55 lb. bags of knock-off Cocoa Puffs that just screams, "I have no regard to my health whatsoever and enjoy drinking chocolate run-off for breakfast!" and I'm picking up the Special K box. Let the ribbing of losing weight and being a wussy girl begin. I just wanted the taste of the cereal! Honest!

So Dantzel receives Self magazine (and in case you think she's one of those self-absorbed girls constantly preening about her image, she also receives Forbes and TIME) and it had the headline of "A No-Diet Way to Lose Lbs.: 20 Foods to Slim You Down!" Since we are on the elusive quest of losing weight (one which just may be more difficult than slaying ye level 16 dragons), I was intrigued as to which these 20 foods are that instantly slim you down without lifting a finger (except, of course, to stuff this miracle food into your gaping maw). I opened it up - as by now, I've lost any fear whatsoever of having my nose stuck in a magazine such as Self - and began to read.

The first entry is steak. No joke. I was a little surprised myself. But the reasoning behind it was dubious. The protein in steak helps reduce muscle loss which ultimately generally follows weight loss. Fair enough. But there are plenty of sources for protein that may be much healthier. In fact, several of the foods that follow steak are noted explicitly for their protein plus other nutrients (eggs, lentils, yogurt, wild salmon, sardines and...Goji berries?). So should steak really be on that list? Especially since the serving size is 4 oz. Hardly the face stuffing event I was primed for when they talk about in their introduction that their "new slim-down mantra" is "eat more, not less!" Then again, I suppose those girls starving themselves to death would welcome steak as an addition to their already pitiful diet.

However, this article was helpful, to say the least. I love blueberries; they are my favorite fruit. This article now gives me a reason to stomach high blueberry prices in the name of health. Also, it gives some very good staple foods to keep around in your kitchen - the aforementioned lentils and eggs, but also olive oil, apples, buckwheat pasta and so forth. Some of the items on the list seem superfluous, as if the writer wanted 20 even foods but couldn't think of anymore and so stuck some of them on there to pad the list - such as tarragon, whose only health benefit is that it's a substitute for salt. Fair enough, but don't limit me to just taragon; any tasteful herb will do.

And thus the love in the love/hate relationship - it seems most magazines geared towards men tend towards three main objectives:

1) Score a girl. Actually, scoring lots of girls (and how to avoid picking up unwanted diseases in the process).
2) How to build up a ridiculously disproportioned muscular body to help attract previously mentioned girls.
3) In case of emergency of not scoring a girl, plenty of tawdry pictures of half-naked women to satiate your girl cravings.

This is a broad generalization on magazines geared towards men. Obviously, something about mechanics, machines, popular science or electronics in general are a distant category. These are the reasons why magazines for men have never held much of an appeal to me. Interesting topics, don't get me wrong, but for some bizarre reason, it's the women magazines that seem to have more interesting stories to me. Not the "Glowing Skin Under $10," but they seem to have more articles about how to protect yourself from harmful chemicals or how to organize your home, or other useful, practical ideas. And while normally health has never been an overly large concern in my life, as I grow older, it becomes a bigger and bigger influence, one readily hard to ignore. So to those who desire it, you may keep your artificial chocolate sludge; I will take my lightly sweetened grain flakes any day - even if it makes me look like a wussy girl.