Kathleen Lunson

There are certain instinctive drives that all human beings share. Hunger is one of them. Eating is necessary for our survival as individuals, so we eat. We can't live without eating, so the drive to eat is hardwired into our psyches. As individuals, we can live without sex, but as a species we cannot, so that drive is also hardwired into our psyche.

We all know what it feels like to be overweight. The self-disgust. The shame. The exhaustion. Unpleasant physical symptoms abound; maybe we even have to have our blood taken regularly to test for diabetes. A trip to the doctor's office includes the inevitable rationalizations about heavy clothing as we step on the scale and later dire pronouncements of doom and gloom from the doctor if we don't do something.

I've been on low carb many times in my life, but when I started trying to lose weight in 1996, I finally stuck with it. I weighed 208 when I started. In December 1998 I got down to 137. I've been maintaining ever since then.

Webster's defines honesty as "the state or quality of being honest; specifically refraining from lying, cheating and stealing, being truthful, trustworthy or upright, sincere, fair, straightforward." The original meaning of the word was akin to the word honor.

Admit it. It crossed your mind to think that a mandatory burka would cover a multitude of figure flaws, didn't it? Did you ever consider joining a convent just for the baggy robe, just as a way to give up on trying to look good?

You can't always get what you want. And, it seems to me, that even if you try, sometimes you can't get what you need, Mick Jagger's opinion not withstanding.

If we're so sure we want to be thinner, why do we so often do things that are counterproductive to that? Why do we cheat? Why do we refuse further tweaking of our low carb way of eating when we suspect it would help us get thinner?