A Better, Thinner, Healthier You
Home Shopping Network
Have you ever wondered what happened to that hyperperky aerobics instructor your mom used to rave about 20 years ago? Well, she's gotten plastic surgery, a new set of bright yellow spandex and is appearing on Home Shopping Network
this month, excitedly pitching the latest in low-impact exercise equipment as if she had discovered the cure for cancer.
For one month a year, America's favorite TV shopping center puts aside the diamondique baubles and Susan Lucci's infamous fuschia ocelot-lined suede bags to offer products for A Better, Thinner, Healthier You. It doesn't take a well-funded marketing
department to realize that every couch potato in the country put "lose weight" on his or her list of New Year's resolutions, and Home Shopping Network was at
the ready with equipment guaranteed to be functioning as a coat rack within a month.
If there was a trend evident, it's that consumers demand exercise in which they are not required to move — at all. One of the network's stars, Brenda DyGraf, came on to demonstrate a device called the OxyPro with Elliptical Motion ($189.95 retail, $99.95 HSN price,
free shipping).
What happens is, you put your ankles in a leather rest, and the device jostles your legs as if it were trying to shake the change out of your pocket. As DyGraf described it to host Callie Northagan — who clued viewers in that it was an exercise show by wearing a 1970s-era sweatsuit — the device increases
your circulation to get your energy back. It was interspersed with people testifying that they could barely walk from the TV to the refrigerator before
the OxyPro, and now they're just about finished with the Appalachian Trail. To get an idea of how it worked, you got to see heat-sensor film of legs, fiery red with warmth after being shaken and stirred.
The device wasn't pitched as a weight-loss product, per se, but as apparently a pre-workout regimen to get your legs moving again. DyGraf spoke often of how it
would get your legs tingling, because of all the oxygen rushing there. With the device's requirement you keep your legs locked straight, it looks
like an invitation to knee injury.
Still, the implication was clear — exercise without moving! That was reinforced later with a non-DyGraf pitch of the AB Energizer Electronic Stimulation Muscle Toner ($119.80 retail, $51.95 HSN, $6.95 shipping), which you wrap around your midsection. It's supposed to be trimming your abs but instead gives you a twitch that looks like your stomach is
preparing for the vomit of its life.
Following the excitable Brenda was Gilad, your stereotypical hunky, lunky, foreign dude
aerobic instructor. (His name is pronounced hee-LAHD!) He sold a series of seven videos ($95.91 retail, $59.95 HSN, $6.95 shipping) in which you were indeed required to move, at least if you wanted to follow the exercises therein. Otherwise, you could watch it to enjoy the low shots of buff, blonde women in tight bikinis moving vigorously on a Hawaiian beach. They certainly showed that clip a lot more than they did the "normal" people performing the Cardio Strike on the HSN set.
Now, one would think that exercising is merely something to do to improve your looks or your health, but then one would not be as ambitious as Gilad. He
knows what we need in post-Sept. 11 America. "You have to be strong, considering what's going on in the world," he intoned, solemnly. If we don't have buns of steel, then the terrorists will have won.
After that, John Abdo seemed like a letdown. He was straight out of the Body by Jake, Get Fit, Don't Quit! School, what with his black tank reading "I'm a Doer" (white T-shirt version available, $13.95 HSN, $6.95 shipping). Excuse me for a moment, but I am the only one who thinks "John Abdo" sounds like a fitness instructor stage name? It's like finding out your math teacher is named Bill Trig.
Like Gilad, Abdo's Walk-a-Dobic video series ($55.97 retail, $33.25 HSN, $5.95 shipping) requires movement, except Abdo didn't appear to be trying to entice
anybody with scantily clad exercisers, although he had the cadre of normal folk walk-a-dobicing in the studio. He also talked a lot about increasing your
circulation. Newspapers in dying steel towns don't talk about circulation problems as much as the pitchfolks on HSN.
About that name, Walk-a-Dobics. That was said so often, and sounded so ridiculous, that it would clearly make a great drinking game in the classic "Hi
Bob" tradition — John Abdo says "Walk-a-Dobics," take a
shot. Even a viewer with a Herculean tolerance would have been on the floor by the end of the five-minute segment.
At that point, I thought I'd better turn off the TV and walk to the refrigerator. To get my legs tingling.
— Bob Cook (bobc@flakmag.com)
