LeAnne Thomas, a single mom of two teenage boys, currently lives and works as an Office Manager in Nashville, Tennessee. At present, she is completing her degree in psychology and sociology. Future aspirations include writing, teaching, and counseling. She has been living the low-carb life since January, 2003.

A flash of silver caught my eye as the sunlight streaming through my bathroom window collided with the part in my hair. "Could it be time already?" I asked myself, as I mentally calculated the number of weeks it had been since I'd had my hair done. Yes — it was time to call my colorist for an appointment. It had only been four weeks, and I was hoping to make it for six. As with my seven-year-old car, it was getting more and more expensive to maintain this old gal.

Unlike the old clunker sitting in my garage, I was stuck with this model until her wheels (or legs as it were) fell off.

My focus shifted from the silvery line of demarcation in my hair to the laugh lines around my eyes that no longer disappear when I stop laughing. There was little for me to find amusing this morning; face to face with the reality that while the girl may be getting better, she is definitely getting older. How much it would cost me to tighten things up a bit, I wondered with hands on each side of my face, pulling the skin taut.

I continued through the list of things about myself I'd like to change if I won the lottery. Porcelain veneers on the teeth, electrolysis, maybe a breast lift, and (what the heck) implants. A tummy tuck was definitely at the top of the list of must-haves, and probably the only thing worth going into debt for should I never manage to pick those winning numbers.

There are many reasons to live the low carb way of life, not the least of which are radiant health and boundless energy. But, if we are to be completely honest, the primary motivation for most of us is vanity. We want to look good. Most of us are willing to forego feeling good in order to be slim.

If you don't believe me, look at the sheer number of people today who are going under the knife and having their stomachs reduced to the size of a walnut, not caring whether they become sick, malnourished, or even die in the process. Or less drastically, we end up depriving ourselves on diets restrictive enough to make us feel faint every time we stand up too quickly.

If it weren't for vanity, I don't know if I could have managed to white-knuckle it through the first week of induction. One of the blessed surprises of the Atkins diet is not only do I look better, I feel tons better. Make no mistake about it; feeling better is what keeps me going with this way of eating. Otherwise, I would be like the masses of other people jumping from diet to diet, popping pills, or finally resorting to surgery. In fact, I've often said the only thing standing between gastric bypass surgery and me was Dr. Atkins. I'm so glad he was there first.

Nevertheless, it is quite disconcerting to face the fact that by the time I reach the monumental goal of losing 143 pounds, I'll also have the gray hair, wrinkles, stretch marks and sagging skin to contend with. I mentally kick myself for not becoming a believer sooner, while I still had a shot at being one of the "pretty people." Then I kick myself again for being so shallow. Ouch! I've got to stop doing that. I've often wondered if my weight problem was not God's way of keeping my ego under control and my spirit humble.

But where did this vanity come from? I'm going to risk being cliché and blame the media, at least partially. I came of age in the era of the supermodel. Ultra-thin, airbrushed images of perfection hammered into my impressionable psyche through the pages of Seventeen Magazine and in MTV videos. As an adult, however, I know that these people aren't real. Not real in the sense that they are representative of mankind (or womankind) as a whole.

I look around me and I see real people; people with scars, wrinkles, saddlebags, and bad hair days. There are more of US than there are of THEM, so why do we feel somehow like we are the ugly ones? Why isn't the world more like that old TV show, The Munsters, where the fair-haired beauty of the family is the one they pity as the "plain one?" Why do women my age flock to their dermatologists for botox injections and chemical peels, trying to hold on to that fresh-faced look just a little longer? As if the ultimate sin would be to "let themselves go."

As I stood there contemplating the concept of being real, as opposed to media-manufactured Barbie doll images held out to us as ideal, I remembered a story I used to read to my children when they were small. So much wisdom can often be found within the pages of children's books, and The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams has plenty of such wisdom to impart.

My favorite part of the story is a particularly poignant passage where the Velveteen Rabbit, a child's toy, asks a fellow toy, the Skin Horse, what it means to be real:

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room.

"Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

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