LETTERS FROM HOME: GETTING IN SHAPE WITH MILK SHAKES AND CREME BRULEE

Feb. 17, 2000

Dear Julie,

Eleven weeks ago, I brought home a book that promised to transform my life in 12 weeks. I'm waiting.

This book isn't going to make me wealthy or give me inner peace. This book claims to be able to turn the bodies of paunchy men and flabby women into the kind of bodies that appear on the cover of muscle magazines. In so doing, the author writes, you will believe in your power to transform everything else in your life.

All this in only three months and 201 pages.

I didn't even know I wanted one of those bodies and certainly never considered myself a candidate for having one, but the photos on the cover of the book mean to change people's minds about what they might think is possible. There are guys in swimming suits whose eating-to-exercise ratio has gone terribly askew. There are women bursting out of their bikinis, though not in a way that might be appealing. But next to these pictures are photographs of those same guys and women become buff and beautiful. In some cases they are hardly recognizable.

Of course, in the "before" pictures everybody is the color of a fish belly. In the "after" photos they have a Hawaiian glow, but the transformation of fat into muscle is astounding.

Not that I want bulges like a superhero's. But when you grew up skinny and small and your dad said "Where is it?" when you made a muscle, the idea of a powerful build has lasting appeal.

As a freshman in high school I used to stop at Griff's for a milk shake every day on my walk home, hoping my weight would build to 100 pounds. It didn't work. When DC gave me a Valentine's Day card addressed to "the man I love" I gasped. Here on the brink of 50, I still forget sometimes that I am a man, not the boy who needs to drink milk shakes to become one.

Ironically, the book prescribes two milk-shake snacks per day containing muscle-building supplements.

It also contains a disclaimer explaining that the people in the pictures are winners of a shape-up contest. They were competing for cash and prizes and did extraordinarily well. In other words, your incentives and results may vary. Greatly.

One week short of the 12-week deadline, nobody but me would know my body is seven days from being transformed. Those pronounced muscles in the photographs on the cover of the book are still in hiding.

I have followed the workout regimen faithfully: Strenuous weightlifting three days a week alternated with a brisk cardiovascular workout. Like in the Bible, on Sunday you rest.

But my modifications may have sabotaged the outcome. I don't use free weights as the book advises. Only the real bodybuilders work out on the side of the gym where all the dumbbells -- not a pun -- and barbells are located. It's seriousness and grunts there.

The rest of us play around on the shiny chrome machines with the handy adjustable weights, carefully and proudly wiping our minimal sweat off the turquoise padding as each exercise is concluded.

Diet has been the most difficult part of the plan to follow. The author prescribes six small meals a day high in protein and low in carbohydrates. He makes no allowances for the fact that DC is trying to perfect her creme brulee recipe and I am her guinea pig. P-I-G.

My real failing is a lack of commitment to the end result. I don't really yearn to look like A. Schwarzenegger. I would rather look like Brad Pitt, but where do you go to get your jaw chiseled?

I still believe in the ideal of self-transformation. If a boy can become a man, a creme brulee body can be hardened.

Love, Sam