I’m sculpting a fantasy and trust me, it’s ab fab

I was at the gym, minding my own business, when I heard a guy say to his trainer, “I want your abs.”

I hear worse at the gym all the time (men moaning as they lift; oh, the moaning). But it stopped me, the yearning in this guy’s voice for his trainer’s abs. As if he’d been coveting them for so long he just couldn’t hold it in any longer. The trainer explained that in order to have his abs, the guy was going to have to change his diet, eat what the trainer ate.

This seemed to me a patently lousy answer. Because as I understood the fantasy, the guy was saying he wanted the trainer’s abs in a more immediate fashion. Maybe he saw himself on an operating table, next to his trainer, both of them under anesthesia. He was envisioning an abs transplant surgery, perhaps, the two men holding hands as they were wheeled into the operating room.

But the truth is, nowadays, you don’t need a donor. There’s actually a kind of liposuction in which a six-pack is, in effect, sculpted into your abs. It’s called abdominal etching.

I called a doctor about it, a leading doctor, Dr. Peter Fodor, here in Los Angeles. For informational purposes only.

Dr. Fodor said he started doing ab etching eight years ago and is something of a pioneer in the field. I was pleased to discover that Dr. Fodor is Hungarian, from a part that used to be Romania, or Transylvania -- anyway he sounded like certain of my relatives. This made talking to him about suctioning out the fat in areas of my abdominal wall oddly soothing.

“It’s not for anybody,” Dr. Fodor said of the procedure. Ideally, Dr. Fodor said, candidates for his ab etchings have 12% or less body fat, work out regularly, if not maniacally, and just can’t seem to get the musculature to show through whatever fat remains. A problem of genetics and physiology, was how he presented what he was correcting.

Dr. Fodor mentioned bodybuilders and gym rats as good candidates, not doughy guys in golf shirts who want to get etched and then drive to the beach, pausing only to get their parking validated.

“I don’t want to do it if they don’t have the underlying musculature,” Dr. Fodor said of the procedure.

As he talked, I felt for my underlying musculature. But I was at work, so I stopped.

Let me say that I have nothing, per se, against plastic surgery. In the interest of full disclosure, I’m a former patient myself (nose job, 1986; peace out, Dr. Glassman).

But me and my stomach, I believe, are coming to an accommodation after years of bickering, deal-making and one terrible blow-up in the dressing room of a Banana Republic (Stomach: “You have to do sit-ups!” Me: “You never support me!”). You know, the normal relationship stuff.

I must say it takes work, allowing your body to be your body. Especially these days. There is currently a show on Fox called “The Swan,” in which women willingly come forth to have their bodies mutilated and then made more “perfect.” You see it all, or enough of it: The low-self-esteem testimonials. The consultations wherein plastic surgeons mark up their bodies with a Sharpie, going over all the body parts to be changed.

Then it’s on to the operations, and the post-op disfigurement, during which the person with low self-esteem adds bruising and freakish swelling to their list of things being played for sport on television.

Its happy ending is “Twilight Zone” happy. Each week, the show’s two contestants stand before a mirror for the first time since the surgery, the show claims, getting a load of their newly molded selves. They’re all dolled up, like gullible rubes for whom the punch line is coming. These women, they stand in front of the mirror and burst into tears, or shiver, or just stand there, going “Oh my God.” “The Swan” being a game show, one of the contestants advances to a beauty contest, while the other swan is released back into the wild.

Presumably, once this “Swan” runs its course, the show will turn to men (and then we can start working on the monkeys. But first the men).

Dr. Fodor told me he’s not a fan of “The Swan.” He sounded personally aggrieved by the shallowness of the show, the idea that plastic surgery can fix you, no matter your shape or lifestyle. By now, he was really beginning to seem like a guy I could not only love, but also entrust with my midsection. And yet, something echoed in my head, something he’d said about the ab etching: “Once you do it, it’s impossible to undo it.”

Stuck with six-pack abs, for the rest of my life. My gut would never forgive me.

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Paul Brownfield can be reached at paul.brownfield@latimes.com.