Suppose that weight loss weren't a highly valued goal.....

[nancylebov]

It's possible that I'm not entirely sane on the subject, but when I look at magazine racks, I suspect that other people don't exactly have a sense of proportion, either.

If losing weight was taken away from the magazines, what would you like to see them giving advice about? Admittedly, if there was just one topic of advice, it would be a major social signal and get weirdly out of proportion, but let's ignore that problem, or possibly take it up in comments.

Possibilities: learning more languages. This has the minor virtue of not being self-serving for me. It's not something I'm interested in doing, nor that I think I'd be especially good at. If it were a major sort of signalling, we'd have the outcome of people shifting from one language to another in conversations to show off.

Massage: we really don't want this as a major social signal, but I think the world would be a better place if more people knew massage-- both self and other massage.

Comments

[azurelunatic]

Meta-strategies for learning and other achievements: how to set attainable goals, how to work towards them effectively, how to test for progress, how to move the benchmarks as needed (either because it's working or not working), how to avoid burnout...

[olimay]

Assuming the quality distribution of advice is similar to how it is for losing weight... don't think that there would be very much good language learning advice. But I imagine self-learners like me could jump on the hype wagon and gather quite a following, just how people capitalize with their fat-loss craze with their "inspiring transformations".