We are all for expediency. Balancing our busy schedules with various obligations may leave us little time to pursue an exercise program and reach our fitness goals.
As with most things in life, the shortcut is an alternative that gamely presents itself, promising all that you want with less time invested and much less effort.
However, let us be extremely wary of those ubiquitous products—the likes of which are aggressively advertised on home TV shopping networks—that lure us with the promise of looking like a fitness-magazine cover model. Washboard abs in just minutes is only a phone call away? Be cautiously doubtful.
Companies are quick to take advantage of our collective desire to look good. Jumping on the health and fitness bandwagon, they cajole us into handing over a chunk of our paychecks with odd contraptions, creams, even certain clothing and footwear that are supposed to get us fit, hand us washboard abs and all, without the need to sweat it out in the gym.
If it were that easy, don’t you think we would be seeing the majority of the population walking around with lean and mean, to-die-for bodies?
Watching too much home TV shopping—what with those fitness models prancing around their sculpted torsos—may indeed cost us a bundle while failing to deliver much results. Same goes with a trip to the mall, where certain brands of footwear promise us shapelier legs, among other body parts. And this is by simply walking in them. We’ve seen it all.
No, you cannot get quick results in three, or even five minutes a day. Not even with that state-of-the-art abdominal contraption or that revolutionary new cream that will supposedly melt your fat away. More so, if you opt to stay sedentary for most part of the day, and go on with your love affair with that bag of chips.
This is not to say that such products will not work. As a matter of fact, they can and will work—but only if we do our part and put in the hard work.
Most of us want to have fit bodies. I’d be hard pressed to find a person who would rather be overweight and unhealthy. Be that as it may, I find it quite unfair for others to play on our desire to look and feel good about ourselves, with that underhanded device called deception.
Truth is, none of those get ripped fast infomercials and print ads will get us the body we want if we refuse to peel ourselves off the couch, embark on an exercise program and begin to eat more sensibly.
There are little shortcuts when it comes to health and fitness. The long, arduous and, at times, torturous road is oftentimes the one that leads to that place where our muscles are, as the millennials would say, on fleek, our cardiovascular conditioning is elite athlete level, getting sick is a rarity, and our quality of life is better than it ever was.