How to Get a Yoga Body
In the past I’ve written a lot about ads I encounter for products I view to be a ripoff. One was for the frozen yogurt robot—call now to invest in one because all the best locations are going fast! (Strangely, neither I nor any of my readers have ever actually seen one anywhere. Guess we’re not hanging out in any of the best locations, huh?)
Well, recently I’ve seen some ads popping up in my Facebook feed for a yoga trapeze. You just hang it from your ceiling, climb into it, swing like you’re the life of the party hanging off the chandelier, and supposedly you’ll be fit and in shape and pain-free. Yes, that’s right, if you purchase this thing you too can have the perfect yoga body in no time!
The ads also promise you’ll be free of back pain in no time! I don’t know about that. I mean, I don’t have any back pain, but I feel like if I used this contraption I would by the time I was finished.
Actually, if I was a personal injury lawyer, I’d forget all about chasing ambulances and just buy a Facebook ad targeting people who have been injured by this thing. You know they’re out there.
Oh, but just for the hell of it I went to their website and checked out a few more pictures of the fabulous yoga trapeze. Look at this one.
Act now and you too can do yoga while dangling from a random tree in the forest!
Perform the splits while wearing a weird take on parachute pants (not included)!
The ads say the trapeze “gives you instant traction” but I feel like what they mean is “will instantly put you in traction if you do one of these moves wrong.”
Am I wrong? I don’t have any money to buy and try one of these things to see if I am or not, so if you’ve used this thing and found that it wasn’t hazardous to your health, please let me know in the comments.
Also, I’ve been hearing a lot of radio ads for guinea pigs lately. Well, that’s not what they say, of course. They start off with some treacly speech about how they understand your problem’s, or your kid’s problems, complete with a lengthy speech about your kid’s favorite color and interests and how there’s more to him than his diagnosed illness. Then they offer the opportunity to “learn about the safety, efficacy, and tolerability of an investigational medication to treat {insert illness here}.”
In case you’re wondering, what all that crap means is, “We want to use you or your child as a guinea pig for a completely untested medication that could kill you.”
In case you’re wondering, you can actually make a living being a guinea pig…as long as the trial doesn’t kill you. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t risk it, and I like money an awful lot.
Of course I get that if no one signed up for these things, new drugs would never get approved. Still, I don’t think I’d want to be the guinea pig, especially considering that many of these drugs treat things that aren’t all that serious. For a long time they were trying to get parents to sign their kids up to be a guinea pig for an acne treatment. The really funny thing was that the ad even stated there was a specific number of zits and “hard bumps” your skin could have to get into this “study of the safety, tolerability, and efficacy of an investigational medication.” Can you imagine calling up this place and saying, “I have 26 zits but one is almost gone, can I get in even though the ad said 15-25 zits? Also, what if one of my zits is a hard bump and not a zit? How can I tell? If I pop it trying to figure out if it’s a zit, does it still count as a zit?”
I’m almost tempted to call just to mess with them.
Then this afternoon I heard a commercial for an approved drug that’s supposed to help people deal with withdrawal symptoms when quitting smoking. While I generally think that’s a good idea if it helps people quit, I have to say I was pretty unimpressed after hearing the whole ad. The list of side effects included irritability, anger, mood changes, behavioral changes, and trouble concentrating. Honestly, the side effects sounded like the very withdrawal effects the drug was supposed to fix!
So How Do You Really Get a Perfect Yoga Body? Or At Least Get Sort of Fit?
The best way to get a yoga body to do yoga. You can do this with a yoga mat and maybe some of those blocks. I occasionally do some yoga poses, but most of my workouts involve running. I run every day, whether I want to or not. I don’t make excuses, because I will always be busy and I will always have a lot to do. Now I just tell myself I better hurry up and get my workout in so I can get to the other things on my to-do list.
That doesn’t mean you can’t get anything done while you exercise. I often plan the things I need to do for the day and think of things I want to write about while I run. I’ve written entire book chapters in my head, and even came up with the idea for my book Fail to the Chief while running one day.
For more on practical tips on how to stop making excuses and lose weight, check out this article.
V. R. Craft is the author of Stupid Humans, a science fiction book series that asks the question, “What if all the intelligent humans abandoned Earth—and we’re what’s left?
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