Maureen Callahan says Lenny Kravitz's Men's Health body is not 100% natural

Maureen Callahan looked at Lenny Kravitz’s new Men’s Health workout flex and heard the oldest sales pitch in the gym: just work hard and you, too, can look like a leather-panted demigod at 62. Her answer was basically, please, gravity has a union contract.

On The Megyn Kelly Show, Maureen Callahan went straight at the premise of Kravitz’s fitness spread, calling his presentation an “unreachable goal” and saying viewers shouldn’t buy the idea that this is merely clean living plus commitment. The claim is specific, spicy, and legally padded with “probably”: Callahan thinks Kravitz’s body has likely been helped by lasers, surgery, human growth hormone, steroids, or some combination of the celebrity anti-aging buffet.

There’s many ways to train. There’s different things that can assist you. But our whole thing is about doing it naturally. The message is you can do it with dedication with hard work. That’s the way I’ve chosen to do it. It’s 100% real.

That “100% real” is the load-bearing phrase. Kravitz is not merely showing a workout, he is selling a moral. The body is the receipt. The subtext is that the disciplined man gets the abs, the jawline, the sunglasses, the whole sexy vampire timeshare package.

Callahan’s beef is with the fantasy, not the sit-ups

Callahan begins with the comedy of the image: Kravitz working out in Jackie O sunglasses, dreadlocks loose, expensive eyewear somehow surviving the sweat economy. It’s a good read because it identifies the video as performance before it identifies it as fitness. Nobody serious wants hair in their face during a workout. Nobody sane is doing reps in $800 shades unless the reps are for the camera.

We’re going to look at Lenny working out in Jackie O sunglasses and a full head of dreadlocks that are just flying all over the place, not at all pulled back in a bun.

Then she drops the real charge. Not that Lenny Kravitz looks good. He obviously does. The charge is that presenting that look as a natural, repeatable outcome for ordinary men is nonsense with a subscription card attached.

Listen, just my opinion. 62-year-old men, I don’t care how much you work out, do not present that way. Gravity always wins.

This is where Callahan is most persuasive and least provable. She does not have Kravitz’s medical records. She does not have his dermatologist’s calendar. What she has is pattern recognition from the celebrity body industry, where genetics, lighting, training, diet, money, possible procedures, and possible pharmaceuticals all get boiled down into one charming word: dedication.

Lenny has had lasers. He has definitely had some surgical interventions. Um he is probably on like human growth hormone or uh some other kind of and or some other kind of metabolic steroid.

The fair verdict: Callahan overstates what she can know and nails what the audience can see. The medical claim is speculation. The media claim is solid. Men’s magazines have spent decades turning bodies into instruction manuals, then acting shocked when readers confuse an edited celebrity image with a normal human outcome.

Her Schwarzenegger comparison is blunt but effective. If Arnold Schwarzenegger, a professional bodybuilder and action-movie monument, visibly ages, then the frictionless agelessness of a rock star fitness spread deserves scrutiny. Not contempt. Scrutiny.

That is an un- reachable goal for most men, let alone 62-year-old men, okay? Um so, don’t let Lenny fool you, okay? And don’t let Men’s Health and the celebrity industrial complex fool you and make you feel bad about yourselves.