You are what you read, someone once said. And what you put into your mind will have a lot to say about where your priorities are and where you spend the majority of your time and energies. If you are starting to develop a more physically active lifestyle with an emphasis on fitness and exercise, it may be time to consider if there is a women’s fitness magazine out there that is suited to your goals in this important area of your life.

When you start to review the vast assortment of magazines out there, you may have trouble sorting out which women’s fitness magazine shares the same focus that you have. You would think that a magazine devoted exclusively to issues involving women’s health and fitness would have nothing else in it but diet and exercise tips.

But even the quickest view of these magazines will tell you that they are often glossy and overproduced, adorned with overly skinny and/or overly muscular women that shout out to you and to anyone looking at this magazine that the extreme looks in a woman’s presentation are what people, men in particular, are looking for.

Any women’s fitness magazine you review with the intention of possibly becoming a subscriber will have one or more emphasis on the following priorities…

• Exercise
• Diet
• Education
• Inspiration
• Sex
• Glamour
• Gossip

Now all but the last three of these goals are appropriate for any health oriented magazine for women. So why do we see such an emphasis on sex, glamour and gossip in those periodicals? Very simply, those things sell magazines. By putting a sexy girl on the front of the magazine, it influences men to buy the magazine for the woman in their life with a thinly hidden motivation that maybe their girlfriend or wife might turn into such a sex kitten. But it also influences women to buy the magazine to find out how to become such a sex kitten.

Examine the magazines you are considering using to help in your quest to become a healthier, slimmer and more fit woman and if the emphasis is too heavily placed on sex, glamour and gossip, it might be best to find a magazine that’s a little more focused on what really matters.

Information about diet and exercise is exactly what we expect form magazines devoted to this topic. It might be a good exercise to buy one copy of each of the leading magazine candidates to become part of your library of healthy choices in reading and perform a rough estimate of the percentage of magazine copy devoted to education and encouragement and what proportion to subjects that are best done by People or Glamour types of magazines.

If that test comes back showing that some magazines just give too much time over to the nonessentials, you have just saved yourself the price of a subscription and a lot of clutter subscribing to a magazine that is wasting your time. And by patronizing woman’s health magazines that are dedicated to helping and encouraging you in your quest for a healthier life, you are sending a message that this is what matters to us as consumers. Then maybe those magazines that didn’t make the cut will get the message.