“I can’t die; it would wreck my image.”

That was Jack LaLanne, when he turned 90, doing the talk show circuit to celebrate his birthday, turning down cake in his honor stating, “I never eat in between meals.”

But no one – not even the world’s first fitness guru, who had more spunk at 90 than I had when I was a 1/3 his age – lives forever. He died Sunday afternoon at his home in California from respiratory failure due to pneumonia. He was 96. He underwent heart valve surgery in December 2009.

Jack implanted in my mind at an early age that as long as you keep moving, you’ll never feel old. “The Jack LaLanne Show” aired from 1951 to 1985, and I remember watching it in black and white, a show geared to housewives. He’d tell us kids to call our moms over to watch, or at least that’s how I remembered it.

I don’t know how or why it was on in my living room on 22^nd Street in Union City; neither of my parents were into exercise.

But then, when Jack hit the airways, no one was into fitness, some even calling it dangerous. Athletes were discouraged from weight lifting, trainers believing that bulking up would slow athletes down.

Despite the critics, Jack came into our living rooms, often accompanied by his white German shepherd, Happy, and his equally-fit wife Elaine, and encouraged people to move.

“What are you doing just watching?” he’d say to us, sitting in our living rooms. “Get up and join me.”

And people did. The first gym I could drive to bore his name. The machines we still use today were inspired by him. He proposed the then-radical idea that women, the elderly and even the disabled should work out to retain and gain strength.

He lived by example, and never stopped telling people that if they eat right and exercise, they’ll always feel good.

Of course, the godfather of fitness pushed his body to limits, always seeming to live by his famous words, “Remember this: your body is your slave; it works for you.”

At age 60, he swam from Alcatraz to Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, handcuffed and shackled and towing a 1,000-pound boat. The next year, he did a similar feat underwater.

At age 70, he towed 70 boats with 70 people from the Queen's Way Bridge in the Long Beach, Calif., harbor to the Queen Mary, again while handcuffed and shackled.

He did these things, he said, to help people. Exercise was his religion, and it was his job to preach.

Well into his 80s he continued his personal fitness routine of two hours a day beginning at 5 or 5:30 a.m. In earlier years, he started at 4 a.m. His show long over, he wrote a book at 95, “Live Young Forever.”

Well, he didn’t live forever, but he always lived young.

I’m forever inspired.