12:10 a.m. It always follows: If I have pizza one night, I go on a diet the very next day. Clockwork. This time I mean it. I really really mean it. I can only stray so far from the established ideal before my alarms go off. And right now, believe me, they're noisier than a bumped BMW in an empty underground garage.

I knew one day that I'd have a use for this photo, even though it means that I'm posting two naked-lady renditions in two days. That should have the quality folk pounding to my site. The body is a fact of life. The body must be carted around every day. Heft just gets in the way.

Yes, I've reached my upper limit, and so I must atone. It's a sorry fact of my adulthood that I can no longer eat like a child. Perhaps if I ate more wisely when I was a child, I would not be in this fix today. But it was fate. I was born in the wrong place. Chester, Pa.

The home of the hoagie. You can look it up. The sandwich of the gods was invented right in my own birthplace and consumed there by the metric ton. Various neighborhood shops had screen doors open year round, and the scent of frying onions for the cheesteak was embedded in the very mesh of my memories.

My mom's white apron was redolent with olive oil and daubed with seedy smears from the hot pepper trays. Ah! A hug from my mom is all wrapped up now with the soft yeasty bread that she rolled, expertly, in white butcher paper.

Creamy vanilla milkshakes were $.50 and sometimes I would have two of them. I used to sip the shakes and eat the hoagies over the opened pages of Seventeen magazine, blissfully drippingly unaware that I was laying the groundwork for endless future frustration. I was as skinny as Twiggy before I knew who Twiggy was.

I have a theory about this. I believe that our bodies have rational memories. As in ration. As in: you'll be able to eat (or drink, or smoke) a set number of any one foodstuff efficiently. After which (set number), the cell-digestion population will begin to sputter and fumble and eventually fail entirely to process that particular food properly.

In short, you will start becoming hefty. Or diabetic. Or worse. I realize, for instance, that I've reached my pizza limit. Igor has reached his chocolate point. I long ago reached my Big Mac and mac and cheese limits. If I try to go against the limit law, I break out in thighs.

I think my body just throws up its metaphorical hands when it sees certain elements coursing (again) through the old blood stream, and like weary assembly line workers, the cells start to let stuff pass through without even bothering to digest it. I've become allergic, in a way, to fattening foods.

Anyway, that's my theory. In practice, it has forced me to start looking at fruits and vegetables in a whole new light. They will save me, I'm sure. Tonight I stocked up on all my diet buddies at the supermarket. They've not let me down yet, and now the fridge is a green, leafy place of no turning back. It's a jungle in there.

You see, the proper Philly hoagie from Chester does not have any lettuce on it. Never had, never will. Not a shred. Sweet peppers, maybe; gubba-gole, certainly. But no iceberg.

Thus, my diet's somewhat obvious. I have an entire, pristine, unused ration card for lettuce, just waiting to be digested. Lucky me.