The _____diet, fill in the blank

Now is the time for all good women to come to the aid of the publishing industry.

Diet Industry.

For the last three months the covers of the food magazines have enticed and seduced me and all other red-merlot-blooded women to cook, cook, cook. Shiny versions of sugarplums have nestled in my head next to gleaming Thanksgiving turkeys, rich velvety dark chocolate truffles, and salads with dressing so rich they are not made on the planet. Food stylists go into hyper-space, convincing me that at this time of the year calories in the pursuit of as I say, "culinary research, " do not count. " They lie. The stylists should be impeached. Off with their heads.

I should have my head examined.

Forthwith I am canceling my subscriptions.

Well not really, and I cannot blame the magazines totally. I was a graphic artist and contributed enough ads of my own in the past, working under lights with the food stylist to make sure the ice cream shoot was luscious. But, I gotta blame someone. Certainly not the last nine months when I either did not eat at all, or ate and drank badly. But, the fickle finger of fate and fats must point somewhere, and so I pick the magazines.

I don't even like to bake cookies. There is one damn thing to after another every 15 minutes, a constant, messy interruption. Except for the ones I make of love for the college kid, I don't bake. I would rather cook a goat for 30 than make cookies for 10. I hate Christmas cookie exchanges and this year make baklava, so simple it is embarrassing. One step.

Yet, the Christmas covers make me THINK I SHOULD bake cookies, and fruitcake, and baba rhum, and Turkey, and stuffing....and I am tipping over. For my friends who do not bake, it is the purchased gifts which also roll in our door, the fudge, nut mixes, candies and nuts, rocas, pralines, and yes, a fruitcake. ( I really do love fruitcake, so shoot me.) As a result, I am sabotaged in all directions by holiday ho ho calories, and I do not mean Twinkies.

So now, these turncoat magazines are full of diets! They started it, it is their fault! There is no way a stylist can make a low-cal no-carb low-glycemic salad look as good as a chocolate truffle. They try. And so, the magazines use all the tricks, and I get sucked in again. My current fave is the South Beach Diet. There is the Hamptons apparently, and the Scottsdale, and now the South Beach. All enclaves of the rich and thin. Or the rich who get thin because they have personal trainers, lyposuction, and professional refrigerators with room for all the arugula in the world to eat. The South Beach pulls out the stops, including an appetizing aquamarine color on the cover, which is light, airy, and reminiscent of the waters off of Monaco. Or, the French women Don't Get Fat Diet: drink red wine, walk the tour de France, and look like CoCo Chanel. Eat these foods, it implies and you too will be at villas on the beach, wearing bikinis as light and airy as water!

There is no Kalamazoo diet, the Des Moines or Minot diet, or other hinterlands Middle America named city diet. Thin and rich people only live in the hills or the beaches. I am waiting with Perrier lo-cal breath for the Vail diet, maybe it already exists.

After stuffing ourselves like geese, we will now have the diet of post winter, just in time to get ready for Lent and improve our own livers. Do without, clean out the fridge, eat those greens and by May, no March! we will be ready for the Bikini diet. I have hopes. I am well aware of the discrepancy, that in some countries and cultures a round woman is a symbol of wealth and fertility. But, in a mix of looking for health, being not obsessive, and role models to our daughters, my friends and I want to slim down a little. Plus I need some new clothes.

Even as I do this, and plan for the next three weeks of the purge and penitence, I realize that in every magazine archive there is a file for the next month, and the month after that. i.e.: Valentine's and all its melt-at-body-temperature Chocolate for Sex recipes wait. Easter with lamb, ham, and deviled eggs is on hold. The dialectic of diets, eat purge, eat, fast, has not changed since the Middle Ages. Only now we seem to tie it to the beach, not abstinence, to sex and being sexy not atoning for sins.

Hmmmm, thinking too much. Must go eat some bread, have some juice, and finish off some of the candy. For in 72 hours, the plan begins. I will name it myself, and pick the part of the world I want, like the Mediterranean Wish I Was There Diet. Arugula, soda water, light cheese, tomatoes, and a sliver of chicken. Sounds good to me, and not a piece of chocolate in the house.