And so we come to it at last. Food. This was the part of writing a weight-loss column I REALLY wasn't looking forward to. Because it, quite simply, makes people into insane, judgmental, unhappy liars.

I have already mentioned in a previous issue that I don't mind exercising, and in fact I kind of like it, because it's adding something to my life which makes me feel good. Making the same mental

leap for diet is beyond my powers of self-delusion. Dieting is taking something away, taking many tasty somethings away in fact. No matter how shrilly the various Health Nellies that infest pop culture tell me that no, really, frozen spinach is much more delicious than mint chip ice cream, and that I'll regret that fettucini alfredo when I'm 45 and wheezing into an oxygen tank while driving my little Jazzy Scooter through the candy aisle at Wal-Mart, I just can't get excited about diet.

Because I'm a fat person, and I got that way by, among other things, really liking food and consuming more of it than was appropriate for my size and activity level. This is the part of the diet conversation

where most people turn into the insane, judgmental, unhappy liars I mentioned. You eat too much, you put on weight. That's basic physics. Yet I don't know a single fat person whose body does not cruelly

violate the laws of physics, usually in collusion with their hormones and genetics, by storing food that those people swear up and down they're not eating, just to ruin their dating prospects and maliciously keep them out of a two-piece bathing suit. And of course, since their bodies are against them anyway, why not have that extra piece of pie? It can't make things worse...

This is insane troll logic, and yet it takes in some of the smartest people I know. Why? I suspect because a) it lets them keep eating pie, and b) there is an entire cottage industry out there dedicated to divorcing people's ideas about food from logic, happiness, and enjoyment.

I'll never forget the two months in college when every other girl on my floor went on the Soup Diet. Does anyone remember this diet? The basic premise was you made this really bland vegetable soup and ate it exclusively for four days, then ate whatever you wanted for the next three. Every Sunday night, the tiny kitchen on my floor would have a line leading out into the hall of twenty-year-olds in Hello Kitty pajama bottoms carrying stock pots with anemic bunches of celery. Despite the fact that they all, I think, got this diet from the same email forward, every girl made the soup different; throwing a little butter in because 'it can't hurt,' or adding noodles. And come Thursday night when soup time was over (not that they all weren't making Easy Mac (just this once) on Tuesday when they were up until 3 am studying), dear God it was like a Roman bacchanal with Double-Stuf Oreos. You'd think they hadn't eaten in weeks. And meanwhile I'm there, smiling a Cheshire smile with my Nutella and pain de Campagne bread...and putting on 45 pounds. Huh. I guess maybe there isn't a moral there like I thought.

Or maybe there is; the moral that you may as well go on a fad diet as eat brie by the wheel if your goal is losing weight. Not the sterling revelation you have all come to expect from me, I suppose, but it's still true. But then, diets are like Fords; they're not really designed to work. If everyone who went on a diet lost weight and kept it off, how would those culturally relevant folks who tell us what's wrong with ourselves buy their private jets? The point of a diet is to get you in a cycle; in the beginning of the cycle, yes, you have to lose weight and still feel reasonably good. But then you come to the middle of the cycle; the body adjusts to the new nutritional intake, weight loss plateaus, and physical malaise sets in. So you turn to what has made you feel good in the past. You start eating the old way again, and put the weight back on, and reset the cycle, ready for the next diet to come along.

So what do I tell you to do now? Do I give you the magic bullet, the diet plan which will taste just as good as pizza and cupcakes yet make you lose weight in spades? The disappointingly incremental weight loss figures you've probably noticed at the side of my column should tell you I don't have it. Nope. I can tell you about squats, I can make jokes about iPods and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but I can't tell you what to eat if you want to lose weight. And my point is, no one can. There's no magic food or evil food; those ideas are peddled to us by people who want to couch weight loss in moral language. THIS drives me out of my mind, and you hear it all the time; "Oh, I was bad today, I ate a cookie." "Blessed with good metabolism." "I was really good this week! I lost two pounds!"

Guess what? You're not a good person if you lose weight. And you're not a bad one if you don't. Similarly, cookies aren't a bad food, and eating a cookie isn't a bad thing. Eating ten cookies at a sitting will exceed nearly anyone's daily recommended caloric intake. Eating cookies every day will accustom your body to processing a lot of sugar, leaving little energy left for burning your pre-existing fat reserves. Again, this is science. Not voodoo, and certainly not shorthand for what kind of person you are.

Basically, you have to consider your body, and the state of health you choose to keep it in, as what economists call a long game. This means, rather than adopting a short-term eating strategy that will cause maximum weight loss in the shortest available time (but not be a way you want to live the rest of your life), focus on adapting your eating style to something that you can conceivably live on without feeling deprived. Yes, you'll lose weight slower. But the point of a long game is that while gains and losses can fluctuate from quarter to quarter, the overall strategy is sound and adjusts slightly to accommodate new variables. Most importantly, you can't 'break' a long game system. Even if you buy a dumb stock (or going back to our metaphor, you pig out on Sicilian pizza and Guinness longnecks), you just absorb the loss and continue on.

For me, long game food strategy means eating breakfast, which I never used to do; it's an easy thing to add to the day, and having some food in the morning means my metabolism can wake up and start burning stuff. If I don't eat breakfast, sometimes I'm not hungry until 3 or 4 in the afternoon; if I do, I'm hungry again at 1. Lunch is usually something frozen in a tray, or a tuna pita, with some raisins and a diet coke. Yes, I will admit this is boring food. But what would the alternative be? A calzone or a burger? Not much less boring, way worse for me. This is probably a good place to point out that most of us fat people didn't get fat on foie gras and truffles. It's not like we're giving up haute cuisine when we decide to play the long game. More often than not, it's processed cheese product or air puffed bread.

Dinner is when I'm home, and that's when I usually eat something interesting if I'm going to do so at all. Long game foods, as far as I've found, pretty much fall into three camps. All of them have their benefits and drawbacks.

First would be diet meals. This is stuff like Lean Cuisine or Weight Watchers foods, available in the frozen foods section of the supermarket. I actually eat these pretty regularly, because I'm not much of a cook, I hate dishes and I'm always busy. Now, let's get one thing clear. If the diet meal box says 'pizza' on the outside, that doesn't mean Elegante's is waiting on the inside. These are alternatives to unhealthy food, not replacements for it. I don't care how pornographic the picture looks, with its artistically placed little broccoli florettes, it is a lie. And if anyone tries to claim otherwise to you, they are also lying. And probably thin, and therefore incapable of appreciating the unctuous rime of joy that, say, a good cream sauce leaves in your mouth. Come on. These are FAT PEOPLE you're trying to fool. We know these things.

But once you get past the fact that diet meals don't taste like the real thing, you can acknowledge the fact that some of them don't taste bad either. There's this one Lean Cuisine meal, butternut squash ravioli, that is flat out delicious and I would order in a restaurant. Plus they come in a lot of different varieties, they aren't too expensive, they're consistent, and they're easy to eat. Basically, they're the Hillary Clinton of long game food. They may not inspire flights of passion and some people hate them, but when it's 3 AM and I'm hungry they're what I'm going to be throwing in the microwave.

Category 2 long game food would be Barack Obama food; elegant, classy, perhaps a little snobby, but always exciting and delicious. I've mentioned before that I like food, and I really do. And by that statement I mean nearly all kinds of food, both unhealthy and healthy. There's nothing quite like chocolate cake, true; but it's equally true there's nothing (for me) quite like asparagus tips braised with balsamic vinegar. Or tuna sashimi with wasabi and sesame seeds. Or tofu and water chestnuts. Do I do this every night for myself? No; but when I do I'm not missing pasta. If you don't have a Barack Obama recipe or two in your canon, go out and learn them. There's food sites all over the internet, many of which focus on healthy food. I've learned to cook things I would never have tried before starting this weight loss project on these sites; and I think I realized that a lot of my reliance on unhealthy food was a crutch to keep me from trying new things. If anything has helped me get over the feeling I'm depriving myself, it's foods like this. If you have a favorite recipe, send it along! Maybe I'll do a column on healthy recipes later on.

And of course, I'd hate to leave John McCain out of the game. In fact, he gets my favorite subset of long game food of all; GRILLED FOOD. Grilled food is honest, it's All American, it's serious business. What could possibly be more Republican than delicious chunks of dead animal and lots and lots of fire? Seriously, I forgot over winter how much better everything tastes when you grill it. And I don't care how addicted you are to butter, your mouth waters when I start talking about steak, vegetable kebabs, and corn on the cob. If we lived in a climate where I could grill all year round maybe I wouldn't have gotten in this mess.

Or maybe I should have just eaten the diet soup. Hey, maybe if I GRILLED the soup...