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As the VP of Anger Management, I see RED when I think how young I was (11 or 12) when I first saw this ad in a comic book:

Looking at that ad as an adult–47 or 48  years later–makes me realize how Charles Atlas played on adolescent fears and preyed on adolescent wallets. I know I ordered the free booklet and read it several times. But, of course, the real information came in a course that cost more money than I could afford on my allowance and lawn-mowing earnings. In the meantime, my father had purchased a set of barbells that came with an instruction book. I started doing some sporadic weight lifting in the basement.

In Newark, Ohio the schools didn’t have weight rooms. There were some barbells in the high school gym, but mainly for football players and the shot putter. But there were a few guys in school who had obviously been lifting weights in their basements or at the YMCA. They had bigger biceps or wider chests than a lot of us. It was obvious that lifting weights could build stronger bigger muscles.

In college I was in the weight rooms a lot more. There were indoor and outdoor track and field season to train for. But between 1968 and 1972 at Baldwin-Wallace College, there was no weight coach. Most of the weight lifting I did was putting in time and going around the Universal Gym equipment and doing all of the exercises. Records were not kept. I did start noticing some guys like our shot putter (Vince Maglio) was lifting more scientifically needed a couple of spotters when he bench pressed. He had a huge chest and the biggest arms I had seen to that point.

I never saw a steroid in college, but heard a few discussions about them.

In any event, I lifted a lot, but never developed a physique like Charles Atlas or Steve Reeves. Reeves earned the Mr. America title in 1947 and later starred in a string of B movies like Hercules and Hercules Unchained. His workouts were legendary.

I was having lunch with Zola today and asked her about the kinds of women she noticed when she was a girl. “I never missed a Miss America Pageant,” she said. “I loved the evening gown competition and wanted to look like that.”

It starts early. An online article, Beauty and Body Image in the Media, offers some research on how widespread body image issues are. And a UK article The Diet Industry: Banking on Failure might make you very, very angry. Especially revelations like, “No industry actually benefits from us actually eating healthily for a sustained period of time.”

If you are going to get out of diet jail and maintain a healthy weight you are going to have to quit comparing yourself to everyone else. And stay away from “the diet industry” that only makes money when you fail at one diet and try another.

In this trailer from the documentary Bigger Faster Stronger you can get a sense of what lengths men and women will go to because they are never satisfied with their bodies. I want you to watch all 2-minutes and 26-seconds and see if you get as mad as I did. Charles Atlas was a rookie compared today’s marketers. This will give you a sense of how the media manipulates you.

Zola and I watched the whole film recently and it got me thinking about how impossible the dream of having a “perfect body” really is. I immediately felt better about myself. Because I instantly understood how and why I have been programmed by the media to feel bad about myself. It all started with Charles Atlas putting something in a little boy’s mind when he was too young to defend against it. Maybe the same thing happened to you when you were little and defenseless. With the right information, you can get rid of your impossible dreams and focus on being your own perfectly wonderful self.

That’s how you get out of diet jail and get on with your real life, not someone else’s fantasy.

I also hope the clip makes you angry enough to never buy a supplement advertised in the back of a magazine showing amazing before and after photography. I hope you are angry that the media has been selling us an unattainable standard of masculine and feminine good looks.

Nobody looks beautiful and perfect 24/7.

It’s madness.

And you have to be mad enough not to get caught up in body image or striving for perfection. There, I feel better. I hope getting mad at the bad role models and ridiculous misinformation flooding the marketplace makes you feel better, too.

I really do.