GOING OPRAH: Part One

I sauntered back into the house following the holiday trip to Chicago and noticed a terrifying number on the scale.

Three-oh-five.

Good Lord. I didn't think that was possible. I mean, even in the chicken-wings-at-eleven-and-go-to-sleep years, I never hit that particular number. Now it was there, staring me in the face. The triathlon was nearly nine months away, but more importantly, this meant the news was bad. I've known people who've weighed that much and they all had pretty much one unifying characteristic: they stayed that way for a damned long time. Much longer than I was willing to do.

I looked at the smoldering ruins of previous attempts to get in excellent shape. The closest I came was Body for Life, where I lost 38 pounds, worked out nine times a week for about an hour apiece, took an astonishing number of chemicals that said "These Statements Not Approved By the FDA" on them, and generally did well. However, with a wife who's three months pregnant and a two-year-old, it's not easy to say, "I'll be at the gym for nine hours this week, working for forty, and sleeping for about fifty; we can work in anything else around that."

Last year I tried the South Beach Diet, a preposterous thing that featured some relatively good food. In Phase One I lost weight. In Phase Two I maintained it. In Phase Three I did a distance running event and a sprint triathlon and realized that carbohydrates were an important part of life. In Phase Four, I stopped working out and let everything go for a very, very long time, about eight months or so. I think I'm still in Phase Four now.

I also managed to lose a lot of weight once when I had bronchitis, when I joined a food-rehab program run by a hospital, when I swam like a maniac before knee surgery, and when I took a jogging unit in high school.

I've had personal trainers and couldn't keep the appointments. I've done diets but couldn't follow the recipes. I've been willing to take dangerous chemicals but then realized they were dangerous. And that's when I decided to look at the weight loss techniques of the rich and famous.

I'm not talking about Atkins or Zone or South Beach. I'm talking about the fact that celebrities have a small flotilla of people who are in charge of various aspects of their personal well-being. When somebody on TV comes up to Sarah Jessica Parker and says, "You have two kids and you look FAAAB-ulous," there ought to be an asterisk and a screen-crawl that says, "This woman employs a personal assistant, a nanny, a chef, a housekeeper, and a trainer to keep her looking like this, and wouldn't think twice about violently expensive plastic surgery if their efforts failed."

So about a week after I got back and saw that terrifying number up above, I saw an article in Las Vegas Life magazine about personal chefs. They made it sound downright affordable. It's when they mentioned for what you spend at Chili's or Applebees, when you average it out, you could hire one of these people, I was intrigued.

Then, I thought a little more about the idea of teaming this with a personal trainer. I already belong to Las Vegas Athletic Club, which has them, and I have it as part of my membership. Then I started thinking of some of the people I'm working with already; a psychiatrist, a babysitter, and next thing you know, it's "Meet My Staff."

This gave me an idea for a book, provisionally titled (until the Harpo lawyers chop it up) "Going Oprah: How You Can Get In Shape Like the Rich and Famous on an Average and Anonymous Salary."

The team members:

PERSONAL CHEF, PERSONAL TRAINER, PSYCHIATRIST, CHILD CARE, LONG-SUFFERING SPOUSE, and MINISTER OF PERSPECTIVE.

I'll fill these in shortly. Stay tuned.