Well. Perhaps working hard at maintaining a perfect body is as much as waste of time as being a classics major.
Working hard at being considered physically perfect--making that your goal, and your number-one priority--makes one rather shallow, self-centered, and is not nearly an impressive achievement as it is to earn a Ph.D. These people have hard abs, no cellulite, but flabby brains. Not to mention: Working out at a gym and eating vegetables and having zero body fat is something that can be achieved quite easily, in comparison to becoming a doctor, lawyer, professor, writer---some have more discipline than others, but that discipline is driven by vanity. Any dum-dum can have a hot body. It takes a lot more work to finish a thesis, and learn three languages, sit in front of a board and then defend what you have written. I have more respect for professors than I do for supermodels or "hot" actresses. So they work out and drink a lot of water and get waxed. Wow, real impressive.
Of course, you can have both, in a way, but one of them suffers. This is just my opinion, mind you, but I have little admiration for those who are physically "perfect" or "beautiful"--that's like complimenting someone for knowing a good caterer. Perhaps I feel we spend too much time worshiping and idolizing bodies and having almost no respect for people who have genuine intelligence and compassion.
I never said we shouldn't care at all what we look like--but this idea that physical perfection is the thing worth striving for, more than anything else in the world, it's dangerous and it breeds a myopic culture of great shallowness and selfishness.