Flab fight phase

Finally, the pounds-packing-on period -- aka Thanksgiving to New Year's -- is past, and it's time to assess and repair the damage.

If getting fit is among your New Year's resolutions, Shape magazine is long on inspiration, with several cool workout routines, including the always-necessary piece on abs training. We also liked the butt workout by "Dancing With the Stars" hostess, Brooke Burke, and the article on skin care by winter sports pros dished up good tips of how to protect against wind damage and winter sun. We also laughed at the advice on how to live better by acting more like a guy. Burgers and beer, here we come!

At Fitness, if you believe its cover story, you can "Drop Two Sizes In Just 4 Weeks." It must be true; it's a promise told each year. For true believers, there's even a story on how to dump your diet and still lose weight. Fitness also goes a step further than its imitators, offering a free music download to help pass the boredom of your workouts.

Fitness and fashion play second fiddle at Self, the mag for the mature woman, who, say, turns 40, loses her boyfriend of five years and her job causing her to rethink her life and make for a happy ending. (This feature actually appears in the January issue.)

Women's Health doesn't exactly earn its title, or does so only insofar as it speaks to the twentysomething self-improvement set. The feature on egg donors does raises some important issues, though, by bringing up the idea of single women in their 20s storing their eggs in case they do not meet their life partners until much later. Oh, and Plano, Texas, is the best place to meet a man: It has 1.39 men to every woman.

In the latest instance of the media coming clean about its complicity in the botched war in Iraq, a New Yorker reporter admits that, in retrospect, he had "little awareness of the media dynamics" surrounding the April 2003 toppling of a massive statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. We applaud this confession: that there was foolish hype around the toppled statue, manufactured by the US Marines, may seem obvious in retrospect. But since the war, the media's broad reluctance to admit its failures in giving a balanced view of the events has only compounded the damage. We also liked the feature on the growing craze for psychoanalysis among China's upper class.

On the subject of foolish media hype, Time columnist Joe Klein complains that the mainstream media's obsession with trivialities such as the "Sarah Palin circus" is making it more difficult to deal with real threats like climate change, a hobbled education system and the financial meltdown. Hear, hear. But wasn't his own magazine that, for no apparent reason, put Sarah Palin on its cover a few weeks ago and wondered aloud whether she'll run for president next year? We're hoping Klein's column is a signal that Time has made a New Year's resolution, but we're not placing any bets.

Like a self-help book advertised on late-night TV, Newsweek's cover story promises "The Truth About How to Boost Your Brain's Performance." After reading the article, we'd submit that reading Newsweek isn't among the prescriptions: in addition to exercise and meditation, the mag advises readers to play video games. This sort of fluff is regrettable because it obscures a few good pieces elsewhere, including an analysis of President Obama's war record, which concludes that he's "a lot more like [President] Bush than you think."

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