So I'm jealous. I'm really, really, almost angrily jealous. Because it's not like I have particularly tortured eating habits, compared to most girls I know. I've gone through that a bit, in and around high school, and I'm endlessly happy and grateful to have left it behind. But looking back, I resent the amount of mental and emotional energy I lost to those thoughts--to planning what I was going to eat for dinner, and berating myself for what I'd eaten at the party last night, and forcing myself through ridiculous exercise routines and talking about dieting with my friends--when I could have been thinking and talking and worrying about so many other things that actually matter.

We should all resent that loss, and recognize it, even in its mildest form, as something we consider briefly and in the back of our minds. Even every time we enter the dining hall and fill up our trays with salad or soup or pasta or french fries.

Who would we be if we could have that time and energy back? My friends and I and, according to a statistic I've heard, the 90 percent of fifth grade girls who diet? I'm not saying we would've written the great American novel--although it's rather nice to think so. It's just that it's such a waste, such a terrible waste. We are, for the most part, no fatter or thinner than we were when we started out, despite our neurotic attention to the matter. We may gain and lose a little weight here and there, but more often than not, it all comes back to the same, basic body.

More often than not, it all comes back to just exactly where our metabolisms want us to be, whether we feed them until they race like trackstars or starve them until they slink along like Calvin Klein models, dutifully hoarding calories in response to the apparent famine.