It can strike any time — even in the early hours of the morning. One user writes: “(Y)a know how when you start moving around in the morning ya pass a little gas. Well, I did and then went into the bathroom and to my horror I had an orange river of grease running down my leg.”

Fellow cheaters advise each other on the best clean-up methods, and some even suggest using panty liners or Depends. One frugal user noted, “I’m thinking that infant diapers might be a cheaper way to go, just use them as a large pad.”

The gross side effects might scare away the less-committed, but some experts appreciate Alli’s very real, very immediate consequences of cheating on your diet.

“It forces you to eat a lower-fat diet — if you don’t, you’re violently penalized for not doing so,” says David Sarwer, the director of clinical services at the Center for Weight Loss and Eating Disorders at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. “When they eat a little too much fat, they’ll learn not to do it again.”

“It,” of course, refers to the dreaded “unwanted treatment effects” of Alli — those nasty incidents that keep users honest. Or, at least, should do so in theory.

Having had one night enduring Alli’s “unwanted treatment effects,” I am definitely not putting my food preparation in someone else’s hands. Not at home, and not at a restaurant. Commercial food, after all, is loaded with fat, even when the menu makes it sound otherwise. So much so that even trained dietitians underestimate calorie content by 37 percent and fat content by 49 percent. And they’re the folks who analyze food for a living!

If they can’t get it right, what hope does a mere Chubby Mommy have?

Fortunately, this will work quite well for me over the next month while my husband is out of town on business. I can go back to “eating like a girl” — oatmeal or bran cereal for breakfast, salad for lunch, Lean Cuisine for dinner — without the yummy smell of “Man Food” tempting me.

And, sure, such a low-fat, low-calorie diet means I could stop taking Alli and still lose weight this next month. But why when taking a pill blocks half of that fat and doubles weight loss? Besides, knowing that any dietary cheating on my part might bring on that orange river of grease running down my leg is enough incentive to make me consider a Lean Cuisine a “real meal.”