From the editor

Stitching together a health and fitness supplement, in paper far more than pills, is, if you’d allow the blasphemous simile, a bit like biting into a big gooey mud-pie… impossible to get a mouthful without dropping some onto your shirt or into life as the case may be.

Here at GP!, we did get rather physical in our quest for stories that we hope would serve to shape and inspire both your lives and your bodies.

For instance, one of our editors took her laptop and her Osho pajamas and moved onto her yoga mat for the month. I’m told she wrote the last few stories while standing on her head. On the other hand, two of our senior writers went out in different directions. One of them ditched the office cab, dusted his old sneakers, strapped himself onto his iPod and started running to work. Today, both his stories and his profile have a lean-mean edge to them. The other went East in search of healing traditions and the energy arts and she claims that she has found the secrets to curing everything, from incontinent grandfathers to inebriated boyfriends. Not every story made into these pages, but every story did make it into our lives.

The team felt that the editor should have an ‘active’ image to go with this page so all one could muster was this shimmy on the snooker table for this issue. But then the team brought out a few options for this issue’s cover and said, ‘Ed, we got this for you… by the way, he acts, and you preach. So who really is more real?’ Hmmm, wherever this goes, this wasn’t going to go down very well on either side of the table, I thought. So, since shimmying is what I do well these days, I shimmied my once-rugged rear out of the chair and threw down a challenge instead of the towel. I pointed at the cover you now hold in your hand and said, I am going to practice what we preach in these pages and by the third issue, become as real as this guy. Forget the shaking heads and sarcastic applause that greeted my pledge, but what I want to say to all of you dear readers is, let’s GP!.

Send us your pictures as you are today and follow the route in the pages that follow. If both you and I happen to be the most improved versions of ourselves in four months, then it would be us, you and I, gracing this page instead of our cover guy. How’s that for a promising start?