FOOD FOR THOUGHT.

Byline: STEVEN SALERNO

WELL, we are well into another beach season, which means it's been seven months since tens of millions of Americans made their latest vow to "get in shape by summer!" So, with apologies to Dr. Phil, I figured I'd ask: How's that workin' out for ya?

(Probable answer: Not very well, if the statistics can be believed.)

"The search for an optimal diet plan," Dr. George L. Blackburn, associate director of Harvard Medical School's Division of Nutrition, has observed, "is almost a national pastime." I'd argue only that Blackburn understated his case: I'd omit "almost" and change "pastime" to "obsession."

"A new you now!" is the message blared from the cover of virtually every mainstream magazine in January, as publications tap the spirit of readers' New Year's resolutions. In women's magazines, this theme commands the cover throughout the spring, reminding readers of the imminence of the annual swimsuit purchase.

But weight-consciousness is hardly an all-female phenomenon nowadays. The ascendancy of such magazines as Men's Health has spurred more traditional men's magazines to run diet-related content, thus giving males equal license to feel paranoid about how they look in minimal clothing. This element -- the tireless appeal to vanity -- is key, and we'll return to it shortly.

America spent $46 billion to try to shed its excess pounds in 2005 and likely will spend $60 billion next year. One-third of all adults were dieting at some point in 2006, including more than 90 percent of women under 30, according to one survey by publishing giant Conde Nast. The top diet chains -- led by Weight Watchers, LA Weight Loss and Jenny Craig -- preach their respective creeds to some 7 million Americans. (Amusing factoid: You can even "attend" Weight Watchers meetings online.) In a poll of Americans who admitted to such plan membership, 37 percent said they'd tried at least two plans.

Behind these stats lurks a bitter irony: As the diet movement swells, so too does the collective American waistline -- alarmingly so since 1991, by every meaningful yardstick (and yardstick is indeed the right word). Six out of 10 of us weigh more than we should; 27 percent of Americans over age 50 meet the clinical definition for obesity. Things aren't much better for our kids, who increasingly are too overweight to hit the lax targets in sit-ups and push-ups that were routinely expected of their counterparts from decades past.

All of which raises the question: How can we be so out of shape if we're always on a diet?

One answer is that many people make a Faustian bargain with the diet industry, investing themselves in a succession of absurd crazes, accepting modest short-term success in exchange for a dismal track record of long-term failure--and health risk.

You needn't descend into the movement's darkest crevasses to encounter that risk, either. Recklessly tampering with the body's system of intake and outgo is asking for trouble, even when you're not gulping obscure herbs native to regions best known for AIDS and Ebola.

Today's typical fad diet reaches cultural eminence without being meaningfully tested for efficacy or safety. Folks outside the publishing business would be astonished at how many "breakthrough!" diets are conceived not by researchers in the controlled environment of a lab, but by an editor and some hotshot literary agent at a pricey Manhattan bistro.

The inescapable truth is that genuine weight control requires dedication over time, usually in addition to major changes in lifestyle. Weight loss is the classic race that slow-and- steady wins. Alas, a phrase like "slow-and-steady" is the kiss of death in diet marketing. We want the pill or plan that screams eat all your favorite foods and lose 29 pounds by Tuesday!

The second factor here is actually the foundation for the first -- and brings us back to vanity. Obesity may be America's most sinister health problem, catalyzing many of the others, but it's also the one we attack in the least serious manner. Weight loss in America is sold and consumed in terms of looks, not health. It's about bathing suits, not blood lipids. (When did you last see a weight-loss ad shouting "Lose that ugly cholesterol by summer!")

And while vanity does make overweight Americans more receptive to a message they badly need to hear, it also gives them a built-in mechanism for shrugging off failure: It's no big deal, after all; you can always wow 'em at the beach next year. Till then, you can wear a swimsuit that covers more of you. Or just learn to live with the way you look.

Meanwhile, the quiet internal damage goes on, oblivious to your rationalizations.

If weight loss were medically driven, not vanity-driven, each year's hysterical and discordant avalanche of competing diet pitches would resolve into something like the consensus that now governs, say, cardiology. Gone would be the flavor-of-the-month fads, each contradicting the other. Americans would turn instead to a set of orthodoxies resembling "the literature" that exists in other medical disciplines. Those orthodoxies would be translated into customized plans by dieticians and psychologists, not literary agents.

Ever notice how people who've never been able to lose weight suddenly are able to do so after a heart attack? That's because the real message finally hit home: Change your lifestyle or die. It's not the kind of perky slogan you're used to hearing each January, but it's the bottom line for many Americans.

And ironically, it's a message that'll get a lot more of us looking better in swimsuits, too.

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