Jack La Lanne: Still crazy (about fitness) after all these years

Whether you like him or not, Jack La Lanne is definitely one of the most important fitness innovators of all time. He's also a great role model for many aging Americans...

Watch out. Jack La Lanne is coming.

Even though he'll soon turn 90, he hasn't lost any of the unbridled enthusiasm for physical fitness that made him a celebrity during the 34-year run of his nationally televised workout show.

He rolls out of bed every morning at 5 a.m., lifts weights for an hour, then swims for an hour.

"It's a big pain in the butt," he said. "I've never liked to work out. To leave a hot woman and a hot bed in the morning, why would you do it? I want to live. I work at living. Most people work at dying. Dying's easy. Living's hard.

"I can't afford to get sick or die. It'll ruin my image."

Having just finished his two-hour workout, he was getting worked up.

"I do things to help Jack La Lanne," he was saying. "You gotta believe in a supreme being. How else can you explain the human body? But I've never heard him knocking on my gym door at 5 a.m. 'Jack, this is Jesus. Time to work out.' God helps those who help themselves."

La Lanne, often called the "godfather of fitness," will unleash some of that exuberance at 1 p.m. Wednesday in the Forest Hills Fine Arts Center. The lecture, followed by a question and answer session, is open to adults of all ages.

In the more than 50 years his wife, Elaine, has known him, La Lanne always has been -- well -- fervent about fitness, she said. She met him around 1950 while she was co-hosting a television show on KGO, the ABC affiliate in San Francisco.

"I was a junk-food junkie," she said.

"He used to come in, and I'd be eating my chocolate doughnut and smoking cigarettes, and he would say, 'You should be eating apples and bananas and oranges, and if I didn't like you, I wouldn't be telling you this.' I decided to try it out and became a convert."

La Lanne, reached at his California home, said he, too, was a junk-food junkie. "I was sick all the time," he said. "It was all this sugar. I was constipated. I had headaches."

When he was 15, he attended a nutrition lecture that changed his life. He began lifting weights at the Berkeley YMCA and, while still in high school, opened his own fitness center in his back yard. He eventually earned the title of Mr. America.

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