In my quest for some semblance of rock hard abs (at this point I'd settle for ripe tomato hard abs), I've attempted many things. I've exercised until I couldn't stand up straight, and for what? To keep Advil in business?

I have tried a diet consisting of nothing but meat. This sounded like the perfect plan for me at first, and I did lose a little weight, but there's a reason God gave us teeth other than incisors. I mean lions don't spend the vast majority of their lives napping, because zebra is energy food. We need carbs, and when those 14 days of carnivorous living were over, I emptied the bread aisle at the grocery store faster than the threat of snow down South in mid- February.

My next attempt at eliminating the squishy region known as my belly came in the form of something called "The Cleanse." This is basically a starvation diet. If starving wasn't enough, the diet comes with a liquid concoction some lunatic somewhere had the nerve to call lemonade. This so- called lemonade is about as far from Country Time as gasoline. There are fresh squeezed lemons in the mix, but I couldn't taste them due to all the required cayenne pepper floating at the top. It also had an organic syrup that at best was an extremely distant relative of Log Cabin. Sounds yummy, eh? I drank this stuff for two weeks, and it did its job, but I felt like I was prepping for a colonoscopy for 14 straight days - not much fun.

So I returned to exercise and Mayfield Moose Tracks. Basically, I wasn't working out for rock hard abs, but for vanilla ice cream filled with fudge and tiny Reese's cups. I've discovered it takes quite a few hours on an elliptical machine and an ungodly amount of sit- ups to stay ahead of that little slice of Heaven.

But my 40th birthday is fast approaching, and I've come to the conclusion that I'm going to give the abs one last shot. On this go- around there's no meat diet or nasty drink, but there is an infomercial. For the first time ever, I've fallen prey to a television sales pitch. It's called the P90X. By it's own description, P90X is "a revolutionary system of 12 sweat- inducing, muscle- pumping workouts, designed to transform your body from regular to ripped in just 90 days." In other words, the P90X would straighten Richard Simmons' hair and turn his pink satin shorts into leather.

P90X is not for the feint of heart and comes with 12 different workouts including something called Ab Ripper X. If that's not scary enough, then there's stuff called plyometrics, core synergetics, and kenpo. I'm having trouble pronouncing these things, much less doing them. P90X also has yoga. Now, I've always thought of yoga as a bunch of Buddhists monks sitting around humming, "Ommmm…" Nothing scary about that, but there are no monks on these DVDs. In fact, after two attempts at yoga (at least the version on P90X), I'm pretty sure it was invented by the Japanese in World War II to break enemy spies. I'm not sure about water boarding, but I am sure P90X is torture.

After two weeks, the abs are ripped, but not in a good way. I think I might need medical attention…and a whole lot of Moose tracks.