Sure some of one's attractiveness can be improved with fitness, but for everyone there's some amount of genetic lottery there; if you don't have it you ain't gonna get it.

That's a good story to tell someone to make them give up. Maybe that's why it's being spread. Keep most guys down, sitting at home alone, so the few in the (not-so) know can have all the chicks to themselves...

Right but you are the product of a previous mating and kids to resemble their parents so the odds of that are low.

If you are a single guy looking for women the best places to live are NYC, Vancouver and parts of the Midwest with major hospitals. In those places there are more women than men. Yes you can work in SV but there’s way more guys then gals there.

For me, the gym is as much about self reflection and self mastery as physical improvement. It helps on many levels.

I had to read that twice to get that "self reflection" didn't mean admiring oneself in the mirror (at the gym). :-)

If you assume that the system is that a woman select the most attractive man out of a pool of candidates, which seems right to me as a gross approximation, that does nothing to change the dynamics of the system. It just gives more chances to an individual to the detriment of the rest of the candidates. It's a zero sum game. Just another treadmill for the everyone to run, if you mind the pun.

The systematic problem is that all developments in the last decades have made dating/sex a very efficient market that is skewed towards winner-take-all. There is zero commitment required, the pools are very large, and selection is straightforward.

That doesn't help with height, for example.