food networkout

My new gym has mini flat screen TVs on most of the cardio equipment. I like to turn on something mildly interesting, like the Documentary Channel, so I can watch it when I run too fast to read the words in my magazine.

I was watching some documentary about young German male ballet dancers in the mountains, when I peeked out from behind my TV into the vast ocean of treadmills and stair machines...

About 70% of the TVs in the room were tuned in to... THE FOOD NETWORK. Sweat trickled down my very furrowed brow. "What the hell?" I may have said. Not just women, not just white people, not just old people. Almost everyone at the gym was watching the Barefoot Contessa season a pork roast.

I am not a TV person, but recently my boyf and I moved in together and now I have...cable! I don't really know what to watch if I turn the television on, so I dabble in the Food Network's programming. I love cooking and I love food and I hate channel surfing. But. At the gym? Huh?

Maybe, maybe, maybe these people are dying to know how to make a meal in 30 minutes with Rachael Ray...?

The next day, it happened again... but worse. Paula Deen was making some kind of southern fried cream-filled chicken pie with gravy butter. This show makes me gag when I'm home laying on the couch, never mind when I'm strapped to an elliptical and feeling each beat of my pumping heart!

WHY? Why do most people at my gym in HOLLYWOOD love to watch The Food Network whilst exercising?
1. The obvious. People are starving themselves to be thin and are employing the oldest anorexic trick: watch food! Watch others eat, watch people cook. But... these people don't SEEM anorexic... yet.
2. The Food Network is boring, and thus meditative.
3. The sound of Rachael Ray's voice makes them angry enough to keep running.
4. They want to look like/look at the glorious Giada De Laurentiis and yeeesss I googled the spelling.
5. They DON'T want to look like/at the Barefoot Contessa. No offense to Dara's mother, who apparently does resemble this tender creature.
6. Mating ritual? Guys want to let the ladies know they are sensitive and appreciate a good meal, and ladies want to broadcast their po-fem domesticity?
7. Food is delicious?

Reason #7 is my personal reason for watching these shows, wherever and whenever... and is actually my motivation for most everything. Yum.