The cover has come unstapled from the rest of the running magazine. So all I have left are promises of the "Brand New You" I could be if I read its contents.

Get Strong: Power Up Hills ... Get Thin: Eat More, Weigh Less ... Get Motivated: Change Your Life.

I want to do all these things, just as the cover model - strong, thin and wearing a motivated look on his 20something face - clearly has. But I lost the contents.

What I would like to be is the Old Me - with fewer wrinkles, gray hairs, joint pains and more illusions. I'd like to believe every metamorphosis into a Brand New Me is like caterpillar-into-butterfly: mostly good.

Trouble is, some pages are bound by glue - and books suggest changes can cut both ways. For instance, in Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," the hero is transformed into a giant cockroach. In Ovid's "Metamorphoses," Daphne turns into a laurel, Ceyx and Alcyone into sea birds. That's why literature should come with parental warnings. Give me good old magazine optimism, any day.

I would hazard a guess that diet and exercise tips appeared on the missing pages. And, not to worry, similar tips may appear in the next issue. And the next one.

The good news is, these old ways to a New Me work. The bad news is that they take work. Give me Botox, detox, lifts, staples, liposuction ... the gamut of New Mes for which I don't have to work, or, for that matter, even participate in; just pay.

But why this pining for metamorphosis in the first place? I see this magazine on the racks - next to "Us," "Men's Health," "Shape," etc. - and think the Consumer's First Commandment must be to hate ourselves.

Why can't we like ourselves as we are?

I try imagining as I brace myself to attack the old school track. ("Old" being relative: I remember crunch-crunching on cinders when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.) Here the track is black rubber, weeds growing through its cracks, ringed by dilapidated bleachers. No one is present to see me achieve my non-feats except the insects.

Scratch that: the Old Me - who used to run more laps of this track, faster, barely sweating, like that cover model on the magazine - is watching. He's standing judgment.

Around I go. My old legs feel good, despite aches and twinges, stretching out in a hard, brisk rhythm. My heart pounds, sweat flows.

My watch doesn't lie, but my antique mind does. "Good enough," it says. Nothing was good enough for the Old Me.

Which, I guess, makes me a Brand New Me. MR