To Your "Health"

If you're like me, you love the thrill of opening your mailbox to find a crisp new magazine full of beautiful people, fantastic clothes, beauty products we can't live without, and maybe a  hint of celebrity gossip.  Not to mention the overabundance of beauty ads (that we secretly love) that comprise at least 25 pages even before the Editor's Letter.  I love the mini satisfaction of removing the protective plastic and setting the magazine on my coffee table or night stand just waiting to be devoured.  Okay, maybe that's a flowery over-share, but the point is, I still LOVE reading magazines.  I'm not sure if it's the paper-lover in me or that my husband is a commercial printer, but seriously...who wants to "flip" through an "online magazine"??  Digital-schmidgital - try sniffing a perfume sample off your monitor.

So after years of being a magazine connoisseur (I still have my original copy of the first issue of Lucky magazine from ten years ago), my glossy-reading tastes have evolved with age, changing wardrobe, and tolerance for tear-out workout cards.  While my favorites still include InStyle and Lucky for fashion and beauty, I've recently added a couple new publications that I highly recommend...

1) Sure, we all pick up a copy of People at the airport as a guilty pleasure, but their newest spin-off is a new must-subscribe: People StyleWatch.  It's literally chock-full of outfitting and beauty ideas, most of which are inspired by or actually worn by celebrities.  The best part is, most of it is very budget-friendly.  I hesitate to admit that it got me to actually buy a pair of cute flat sandals from...Payless (of course, I have to keep them separated from my Weitzmans and Blahniks for fear of a stilleto stand-off...or would it be a closet shoe-down?).

People StyleWatch

2) After many years of subscribing to Self magazine and realizing I had basically read the same "get-fit" articles every two years (not to mention getting really tired of their annual Workout Challenge that was mostly geared toward overweight couch potatoes), I finally had to break up with Self.  Fortunately, my mom turned me on to Health magazine - at first I thought it was for the over-50 crowd, but turns out, it's for 30s - 50s, and I love it!  

Their articles are brief (usually one page or less), relevant, and full of quick tips and ideas to simply better your health.  No lengthy recipes with 27 ingredients I'll never buy, minimal "tear-out" workouts (who actually DOES those??  Have you ever seen a woman at the gym with pages torn from a magazine??), and no 20-year-old rubber people showing me how to twist myself into a human pretzel while wearing THE best sports bra and minuscule hot pants (okay...they do feature pretty women in workout gear, but for some reason, they don't taunt me like other magazine models). 

As someone who doesn't cook at all, I've actually tried some of their easy "skinny cocktails" and "mini meals," and they're great.  The first I ever heard of Bethenny Frankel was in Health magazine because she contributes a monthly column with really yummy and EASY recipes (I've never watched any of the "Housewives" - too busy overseeing the caste system that has overtaken my footwear).

I read every issue of Health cover-to-cover, and rather than feeling like a guilty fatty for skipping my workout yesterday, it always seems to motivate me to just...be healthier.  And it sure doesn't hurt to be on the LOW end of their age demographic vs. feeling old (hence my reason for breaking up with Glamour around age 27 and Cosmo around 18 - I'm pretty sure I read Seventeen longer than Cosmo since it's more respectable).

Pick Health up next time you're at the Whole Foods checkout, and look closely at the titles because you do NOT want Women's Health - that IS the epitome of bra top workouts, 20-yr-olds with six pack abs, and an ever-present subliminal finger shaking of why you should be 10 pounds thinner (you can detect the latter easily since the cover model is always that - a MODEL, vs. Health which always features a healthy actress on the cover).

To Your Health!