How’s your New Year’s health and fitness resolution doing so far? For our friend, little Miss Pat Ogden, it doesn’t appear to be going too well. The young LIFE Magazine model has been pressured into joining the Slenderising Salon, the newest fitness fad that is all anybody can’t talk about in 1940s New York.
Shot by our favourite LIFE photographer, Alfred Eisenstaedt, let’s take a tour with Pat and check out all these magic fat-blasting machines everyone is going on about…
Above, Pat starts out with “abdomen massage” on the Roaler Massager.
Next, she’s onto the ‘Slendo Massager’, It “runs rollers up-and-down to electrically rub away stomach, hips and thighs”.
I’m not making this stuff up.
Here, Pat (staring into the abyss while wondering how it came to this) uses a “Wooden Barrel Massager to reduce hips and buttocks”. And if you like having fingers, be sure to keep your hands well away from the machinery.
She might look like a lab rat but of course Pat Ogden is simply enjoying the benefits of “the Back Ring Roller, designed to work on fatty parts of back from waist up”. Her salon buddy Ann Miller is using a modified “Slendro Massager to reduce hips”.
And this boys and girls, is the Roaler Massager. Pat has perhaps found a more, erm, creative use for it.
Don’t be silly, of course Pat hasn’t been sentenced to the electric chair! No no, our lovely guinea pig is now taking a leisurely moment to finish her knitting in a padded chair while leg rollers work from thigh to ankle. And careful with those joints, you naughty metal flesh-eating machine!
So, how’s the prospect of a nice brisk jog in the park looking right about now?
All images from the LIFE Archives.
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