Inspiration in life may come from any source. Inspiration for a better body came from the body of Christy Brinkley. Indirectly.

My last visit to see Dr. Guy Yatsushiro, one of my favorite doctors ever, was uneventful. Perfect blood pressure. Low cholesterol.

Uneventful except for Dr. Guy's parting words.

"You need to exercise more. Your legs are fine, good muscle tone, but your arms are flabby. Get some exercise from the waste up."

The 'guy' doesn't mince words. That's how he saw it. As usual, he was right.

Walking is decent exercise. For legs. For breathing. But not much else. As is the case with much of the really good advice I get, I ignored it for a about a year. That's when I saw Christy Brinkley on television hawking the Total Gym with her sweat buddy, Chuck Norris.

Looks to me as though Chuck sweats more than Christie but watching her is more enjoyable. And inspiring.

I thought, "Hey, she's my age and looks great." Then I said, "Honey, why can't you exercise and look like Christie Brinkley?"

Later that night, as I was sleeping on the sofa, it struck me that maybe Dr. Guy was right. I needed some exercise between the waist and the head. The Lord knows I get enough thinking exercise trying to figure out how I made it to the sofa.

I shopped around a few months and finally settled on the Brinkley-Norris Total Gym. Not the one that costs $1,000 or $2,000. Not the Bowflex which requires a mortgage. Health is important to me. So I settled on the $350 Total Gym from Sports Authority. One of my sons picked it up and carried it home. It was heavy.

This isn't an endorsement (unless getting your wife to look like Christy Brinkley is the end result, but since it's not an endorsement then that should tell you how much success my wife has had in her transformation). I needed something small to exercise parts of me that don't get much exercise.

After a week of playing around with different exercises I came up with a good routine-- 12 specific exercises for the whole body; arms, shoulders, back, legs, stomach (I hesitate to use the term "abs" to describe what surrounds my navel). It takes about seven to 10 minutes to run through the whole circuit of exercises, and I do it two to four times a day, with the average about three. One day a week I'll skip the circuits.

What happened? Besides the pain to each of the aforementioned body parts, and a shortness of breath sufficient not to remember what I ate for breakfast, but I think it might be fruit? Nothing.

Nothing happened. At first. After a month, the exercises became a bit easier, so I adjusted the incline to add more weight. Me. Speaking of weight, nothing happened there, either. Not up, not down. The desired exchange of body fat to toned muscle just didn't happen right away. But it did happen.

Every week I increased the number of repititions for each exercise by one. After two months, weight started to drop. Slowly at first, then steadily. Then I lost a couple of inches off the waste. In the beginning of the exercise program I sweated like a Dolphins lineman playing in Miami in September. After nearly three months of regular exercise, I can tell the difference all over.

Muscle tone is better, stamina is higher, sweat is lower, and my wife thinks she's living with Chuck Norris' much younger brother, Ronnie.

Thanks, Christy.