When Nintendo introduced the Wii Fit, most of its media coverage could be reduced to a loud, desperate cry for help: “Is this how we’ll finally stop being so fat all the time?” When Ellen DeGeneres demonstrated its exercise benefits on her daytime talk show, then rolled out a skid of Wii Fits, one for every member of her largely female and over-40-and-lovin’-it studio audience, the reaction was so tearfully ecstatic that it was easy to forget this was just a video game and not the second coming of Fen-phen.

My own friends — people who seemed almost morally opposed to fitness — were drinking the Wii Kool-Aid, too. One male friend boasted, “I’m even doing yoga now, thanks to the Wii” — a claim that sounds uncomfortably similar to, “My sex life has really improved, thanks to this new electric vagina.”

Video-game-as-exercise-solution might seem like a needlessly complicated way of achieving a simple desired effect. But the hype and hope behind the Wii Fit corresponds nicely with the entire exercise and fitness industry, which seems predicated upon the idea that the only thing more satisfying than stating self-improvement goals is creating pricey obstacles for achieving them.

Consider the amount of equipment that has been designed to stand between you and your first sit-up. Exercise wheels. Body balls. The Ab Rocket folding chair. One fitness company named Slendertone offers a line of wearable fitness equipment — including thigh-and-ass-toning shorts — designed to stimulate muscles through electrical pulses, even while you sit idly in your cubicle. (I would imagine wearing a full Slendertone outfit feels like being molested by ghosts.) As each emergent exercise trend — and whatever equipment, DVDs, video games and vibrating shorts are associated with it — presents itself as key to unlocking the Perfect Body, most of us just end up burdened with an unwieldy and expensive set of keys.

Charles Atlas never had this problem, and not just because he was born well before the electric vagina really hit its stride. In 1922, Atlas began marketing his Dynamic-Tension course, a complete fitness program requiring no equipment or weight training of any kind. Instead, it promised to “Make a Man of You” through a series of exercises that worked muscle against muscle — basically, isometric exercise with an added range of motion.

Most people, including me, probably became familiar with the Dynamic-Tension course from one of its many advertisements in comic books — the preferred reading material of anemic weaklings. The illustrated ads featured a “bag of bones” getting sand kicked in his face by a beach bully, then enrolling in the course, and returning to the beach later to sucker-punch his previous tormentor. Alongside the comic strip was an image of Charles Atlas, dressed in a tasteful leopard-print bikini swimsuit, urging you to order his mail-order course. If nothing else, one had to admire his confidence.

More than 80 years since Atlas first began pitching it, his Dynamic-Tension course is still available through mail order, although these days one can also download it as a PDF. Apart from that tiny concession to space-age technology, not much else has changed. I know, because I tried it for nearly a month. (You see, in addition to being a critic of the fitness industry, I’m also one of its many victims, and I have several barely skimmed books, a neglected gym membership, and two mint-condition speed ropes — a “home” and “away” model — to prove it.)

I knew almost nothing about the course before purchasing it but figured it would amount to little more than push-ups, sit-ups and occasionally pressing my palms together very, very hard. Turns out the 90-plus-page course book was slightly more rigorous, but who am I to judge a man who gained thousands of followers without ever having to put on a pair of pants? So, for the next several weeks, I awoke in the same ritualistic manner prescribed by Lesson 1. Almost immediately after planting my feet on the floor, I filled my lungs to capacity with air from my open bedroom window. Then I dragged two Eames shell chairs into my living room so they faced each other, about 2 feet apart, and performed a set of dips between them. Next, I stood before a mirror, held my hands as if grasping an imaginary rope just above my head, and pulled downward toward my knees while tensing my arm and chest muscles to provide resistance. According to my new fitness guru, if I “hold in the mind’s eye AT ALL TIMES the Ideal of Physical Perfection,” soon I could advance to other vitality-building exercises, such as gently and rapidly punching myself in the stomach, and washing my genitals with ice water. Yet somehow this still felt less degrading than a spinning class.

One thing I definitely hadn’t counted on was Lesson 2: Nutrition. Here, Atlas outlines his mandatory dietary and lifestyle restrictions — no caffeine; no refined sugar; no bleached flour; no white rice; no fatty meats; no pickles, mustards, vinegar or other acidic spices; no soft drinks, coffee or tea; no staying up past midnight, ever. Reading that chapter was like having Charles Atlas ask me to list all my favorite things in the world, then grab the list from my hands, crumple it up and toss it — and some sand — in my face. (Atlas does make one notable exception for candy: “If you must eat candy at times, be sure it is of the very highest quality.” Sounds like someone can’t live without his truffles.)

Atlas urges his students to “resolutely curb your impulses” and to “put pep and punch, vigor, vim and snap into every movement!” Those seemed like reasonable demands for exercise training. I figured I could summon a bit of pep and, if the situation called for it, maybe even a bit of vim. But after just two days without espresso or candy, I was forced to accept the fact that until now most of my pep and punch had been chemically induced. Instead of picturing perfection, I obsessed over how I would first cheat, or fail completely. Not “if,” because there was no question. I knew I would fail. But how? It was a race to see which aspect of this program would become unbearable first. Would the exercises grow tedious, or too difficult? Would I backslide into my two-packs-of-Sour-Patch-Kids-a-day habit? Would the caffeine withdrawal headaches defeat me? Would I submit to temptation over a slice of pizza, or some lasagna? And how did I make it into adulthood with the self-discipline of Garfield?

Somehow, I slogged through the course with only an occasional transgression. (You win this round, beer.) Considering how quickly exercise trends get debunked — cough Ab Rocker cough — the most surprising thing about Charles Atlas’ pre-Depression fitness philosophy is how well it has stood up over time. The course is one-part exercise, one-part diet, two-parts photographs of Atlas in a thong, with the remaining parts dedicated to motivational messages delivered by its author in loud, scolding tones — ELIMINATE FEAR. CONQUER WORRY. OMIT DEPRESSION. NEVER CLOSE YOUR BEDROOM WINDOW. Putting aside his tenets’ eerie similarity to a Scientology recruitment pamphlet, the general instructions within each lesson in the Dynamic-Tension course contain a thread of common sense that is just as relevant today. Atlas advises against over-exertion and encourages stretching for flexibility. He champions hydration, condemns enriched white flour and rice, and makes a prescient argument for organic foods, instructing the reader to “exercise care and choose only those [foods] that are called organic. That is, foods from which the life-principal has not been extracted by commercial processes.”

In every lesson, I found something I’d heard echoed by contemporary fitness experts. Atlas’ instructions to avoid acidic, spicy foods like pickles, ketchup, vinegar and mustard are remarkably similar to one of the main principles in “Dr. Joshi’s Holistic Detox,” a recent best-selling diet book heartily endorsed by actress Gwyneth Paltrow. Although I’m not sure if Dr. Joshi, like Atlas, also recommends dousing one’s genitals with icy water each morning until you experience a “pleasant warm glow in that region.”

Of course, for each good idea contained within the Atlas course, there is an almost equal measure of bat-shit crazy. Sometimes I found his methodologies questionable, such as his advice for avoiding muscular stiffness: “feed the tissues by rubbing them gently with pure olive oil.” (The course also suggests reserving some extra olive oil to rub into your scalp, which must have produced a smoky rotisserie-chicken aroma at the beach.) He also suggests a few too many bracingly cold morning baths. Combined with Atlas’ insistence on leaving windows open year-round to let in fresh air, I wonder if he should have added an appendix to his course, titled “Coping With Pneumonia.”

Dynamic-Tension also devotes a borderline obsessive amount of attention to developing manly breasts. Atlas believed the chest, rather than the abdomen, was the body’s core source of power and that undeveloped chest muscles were evidence of systemic weakness and lowered resistance to disease. Throughout the course, Atlas returned to this subject again and again, never missing an opportunity to promote his own juiced and gleaming pecs, which he claimed were the pride of the health, fitness and science community. This singular emphasis on chest strength felt outdated, as did the course’s exclusion of any kind of aerobic training. Despite Atlas’ concern for deep-breathing fresh air — he maintained fresh air was as much a food as any fruit or vegetable — I never found anything in Dynamic-Tension that noticeably increased my heart rate, aside from the occasional fear of being laughed at while performing certain exercises.

Even casually ignoring select words of wisdom — against Atlas’ better judgment, I declined performing all of my exercises in the nude — I surprised myself with the level of dedication I applied to both exercise and dietary restraint while on the program. I got a little shaky whenever I smelled coffee, and any time I passed by a display of delicious cakes — why did I keep finding myself outside bakeries, anyway? — but I held strong. Going to bed early, however, proved nearly impossible and I abandoned that instruction after just two days. In my defense, Charles Atlas created this program in 1921, when there was nothing much to watch on television.

In just a few short weeks of training I already noticed improvements. I could see a difference in my chest. It was slightly more defined, less in need of underwire support. I had more energy, and I could tell I’d lost a bit of weight — maybe only 2-3 pounds, but enough to enjoy sitting again. It was impressive, especially when my work had consisted mostly of standing in front of my mirror, practicing Lamaze-style breathing and making myself extra tense, one muscle group at a time.

There was one very unexpected and unfortunate side effect of my new multi-grain diet, however: uncontrollable and constant flatulence. Really constant. Like, if Branford Marsalis held a note this long he would get a standing ovation. I never figured out exactly what caused that 24-hour methane stutter, but it might have been the sound of my gastrointestinal system gasping for its first breaths of air after being choked by whole milk vanilla lattes, cake frosting and Twizzlers for so long.

With just one month spent training, the results obviously weren’t dramatic. I was still several lessons away from completing the course and gaining the strength and confidence necessary to walk around the beach shirtless, punching strangers in the face. Though I’m not convinced Dynamic-Tension was perfect for me, the structure certainly helped. It also confirmed my suspicion that the key to unlocking the Perfect Body is mental, not material. The incentive to get in shape has to exceed the novelty of participating in a virtual yoga class taught by a video game. Speaking of real incentive, Charles Atlas offers an inspirational “Feats of Strength” section at the end of his course, featuring party tricks such as Tearing a Telephone Book in Half, Holding Two Cars Each Going in the Opposite Directions and the ever-popular Lifting a Pony. (“You will be amazed to find how easily you can lift the pony on your back.”)

Unfortunately, unlike the rest of the Dynamic-Tension course, those exercises will require some additional equipment.

Dec. 10, 1999

“I dunno … I’m just a little weird today.”

– Oct. 18 Diaryland entry from “faded_mind”

While the Web seems to be slowly collapsing into a small, well-publicized group of uniform, corporate-sponsored networks (Snap, Go Networks, Lycos), online diaries have survived on the outside, occupying that Internet space where a level ground for publishing still exists. Minimal design skills are required; all you need is a healthy obsession and a modest amount of disk space on someone’s Internet server. Online diaries are of course inconsistent in their quality, but they’re also unrelenting in their honesty. If the bigger sites are starting to resemble major television networks, complete with the accompanying “same crap, different channel” feeling, online diaries are holding their position as the public-access programming of the Web.

When human nature meets easy entry, confessionalism results. Services like Geocities and Xoom, which offer free Web sites to anyone (no matter how great their personal problems), have been responsible for thousands of individuals creating and maintaining diaries for everyone (or no one) to view. The subjects range from the outrageous to the everyday, but the structure is fairly consistent: today’s date and entry, links to previous dates and entries, a guestbook, an e-mail link. But even with free server space and online connectivity at work and school, it has been the responsibility of the individual to plan the structure and design the diary.

But Andrew Smales and an ingenious site called Diaryland might change all of that. Smales is a longtime Web diarist and Internet absurdist. His personal domain, Be Nice to Bears, boasts the slogan, “No Content Ever. It’s a Promise.” (In fact, it has a personal diary, some links and a selection of animal pictures against weird backgrounds.) He launched Diaryland in September, marrying his experience as an online diarist with his programming skills.

Diaryland is an online community-cum-free Web service for other diarists. Users sign up, receive a Diaryland subdomain with unlimited e-mail aliases, and gain access to a variety of diary templates.

Yes, templates. What distinguishes Diaryland from most other free home-page services is the way it is custom-built for handling journal entries. The templates are many and dizzyingly varied — a riot of colors and formats and background designs. Each template offers the same navigation: “latest entry,” “older entries,” “contact me” (with the e-mail link of your choice) and a link back to the Diaryland home page. No HTML required, and the site automatically archives your older entries for you. Diary-in-a-box.

“A conversation in my religion class reminded me of how i used to try and send chad a thought. I’d trace the thought’s path from me in my bed, down the street, through my neighborhood, across the highway, through chad’s neighborhood, through the door, past the kitchen and the living room, into his bedroom and into his sleeping brain. Once the thought was there, i would concentrate on deeply nesting it there … rooting it. I just wanted him to keep me in his thoughts. I wanted him to call me the next day.”

– Nov. 16 Diaryland entry from “engineer”

On any given day, one can browse the members directory and read entries that range from the exhaustingly banal (“A new mall just opened up a couple of miles from my apartment, and a new Wal-Mart supercenter and Sam’s Club just opened up here, too” — Steeve) to the revelatory (from Serenity: “I mean I can actually look in the mirror and NOW finally say ‘Alyssa Blythe Megan, you are beautiful’ … and actually be able to believe it”) to the unabashedly ugly (“I was just summoned into the other room so that my father and his shithead girlfriend could make fun of me. I hope she dies slowly”). Cliques have even formed, producing the occasional meta-narrative in which diarists reference other diarists (sometimes describing the same event in two different voices).

The collective Diaryland population certainly boasts some variety in personal experience and eloquence — after all, the diarists’ ages range from 10 years old to a few members of the punchcard-computer generation — but most of the entries share a common fabric from which most expositional writing is woven. Angst, ennui, self-doubt and the pendulums of interpersonal relationships largely characterize the postings, even if the target of these emotions changes radically. (Insert boyfriend/girlfriend/stepmother/sociology professor/best friend/other Diaryland member here.) Different people, familiar feelings, communal templates. Plunging into Diaryland can be a lot like reaching into your closet in the dark: You might not get exactly what you want, but it’s probably close enough.

The ironies of Diaryland are many. It’s the most personal of writing in the most public of mediums, and its substantial aggregate of voices makes this particular irony even more patent. It seems weird to be creating a deceivingly diverse array of templates for the most individualistic of expression. And in the end, aren’t people just assembling themselves together into just another mass-market auction house or search engine, saying, “Find me! Find me!”?

Smales apparently has chosen to let these overtones this escape him: “I just like making things, little self-contained projects.”

For all the seeming naiveti of Diaryland, it’s a bit difficult to believe that it was built on such a simple premise, without any ironic intentions at all. Especially considering some of Smales’ previous pet projects. After all, he was responsible for a rather notorious Web page entitled, “People I Would or Wouldn’t Fuck on the Internet.” The page, created by the fictional “Matty Lewis” and complete with highly calculated misspellings and malapropisms, took pokes at several prominent online diarists and caused a bit of speculation about the true identity of its author. While some tried to track down the real Matty Lewis, Smales actually received several solicitations from diarists campaigning to be added to the list or (more often, and more ludicrously) moved from the sexually stigmatizing column B to column A.

But bring his previous offenses into question, and Smales actually seems a bit surprised: “A few people think I made Diaryland as a bit of a joke, but I swear I’m too lazy to build all of this as a joke. I basically wanted to make a system that was easy to use for people who didn’t know anything about HTML and this seemed like the best way to do it.” Indeed, his decision to create Diaryland was a product of his online interaction with smart people who didn’t have the time or energy to create their own home page. Smales wanted to read their words online, so he built them a tool.

Smales claims no less than 4,600 active Diaryland members, garnered almost completely through word of mouth. (He estimates approximately 100 new members are signing up each day.) Diaryland does offer some attractive templates, after all. It also gives HTML-savvy members the ability to alter their templates.

Finally, unlike the crop of free home-page tools from sites like Tripod and Open Diary (another diary community with slightly more ascetic template designs and tools), Diaryland does not display ads on members’ pages. (The site does, however, collect demographic information from users during registration; Smales has entertained the idea of hosting banners but, he insists, ads will never appear on users’ individual diary pages.) Combine these features with the appealing handmade quality of the site — browse Diaryland and you readily see that it was the endeavor of a single online enthusiast — and it’s no wonder Smales is playing landlord to a swelling legion of Web Confessors.

“Do not bring a boyfriend [to college] — it is like bringing sand to the beach.”

– Nov. 22 Diaryland entry from “Toastgirl”

The natural honesty running through Diaryland serves as the best indication that the site has comfortably transcended any initial dubious regard or ironic undercurrents. But what is the secret of its success? Is it an allegiance to the Cult of Andrew? (The only publicity Smales provided for this project was an announcement on Eggpost, his personal e-mail newsletter.) Is it the site’s alarmingly cute template designs?

Smales has other ideas about the site’s appeal: “I’m biased because I would rather people use Diaryland because it’s fun — but I think people use it because it’s easy and because it’s free.” So, perhaps Diaryland’s tools for community necessarily compromise the individuality of the personal narrative, but the importance of its existence to its members seems to supersede its ironic overtones. It remains an accessible conduit for personal expression, a concept that tends to make any self-conscious trappings melt away.

And if Diaryland’s free service and ease of use really catch on and it matures into the “most ridiculously over-featured Web service” Smales originally intended, Diaryland will hopefully avoid becoming another bland network of cookie-cutter content, like Yahoo and its brethren. In a perfect world, its constituency of heart-on-their-sleeves members will continue to thrive off their thoughtfully designed diary templates, and the individual will persist in the text, even if he gets a little lost on the surface.

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You know you have a problem with something when you are willing to lie to enjoy it. For instance: On a recent Saturday afternoon, when my girlfriend asked what my plans were for the day, I grimaced and complained that my faultless self-discipline demanded that I spend a rare free weekend afternoon at home, working on some writing. A perfect lie — untraceable and, indirectly, even ennobling.

In reality, I was headed downtown with my Sony PlayStation tucked furtively into my backpack between a change of clothes, destined for Manhattan’s Chinatown. I was going to do something I had been told I should have done a long time ago. As I entered the nameless shop and slid the console across the counter, the clerk and I exchanged only four words in total. Me: “Mod chip.” Him: “Cash only.”