At my husband’s request, I’m not going to be trying that Cabbage Soup diet until the weather warms up. He’s got a point: being cooped up in the house with the smell of cooked cabbage (and the GI symptoms that can produce) is pretty much anyone’s idea of hell. Which means I either need to look into hotel deals or wait and, well, I’m quite skilled at postponing anything diet-related.

Then, yesterday afternoon one commercial after another came on TV pitching Alli diet pills as the cure to all diet problems, which made it really difficult to enjoy the jalapeño and bacon cheeseburger my husband made for our lunch. But it did remind me that I’d had a little success with Alli over the summer, so why not give it another try?

After all, I have everything I need already to get started: a spare bottle of pills and six brand-new pairs of dark-colored sweat pants thanks to a sale at Wal-Mart. Anyone who’s taken Alli in the past knows that dark-colored pants are absolutely essential to dealing with the possible “unwanted treatment effects” including bowel changes.

Bowel changes. Notice how they phrase that? It means stuff will be happening the likes of which you could never have imagined. It’ll be like a daily Dean Koontz novel inside your underwear.

If you wear underwear, that is.

If you happen to have grown so fat that the waistband of your silky leopard print binkins can no longer be seen beneath the hanging flap of your lower abdomen, well, you might very well choose not to bother with the panties, anyway. That means dark pants in absorbent fabrics are even more essential.

So, what the heck, I figured. My husband and son were planning to be gone for the rest of the day, and after polishing off my son’s fries along with my hamburger I couldn’t imagine eating anything for dinner. Well, maybe just a little soup and some crackers… with cheese… if I got hungry. But certainly not the chili and chicken tamales I’d planned to make for dinner.

Now, while the makers of Alli seem to go to great lengths to remind users to take their pill with each meal, and to warn that consuming more than 15 grams of fat during the meal will result in those “unwanted treatment effects”, what they don’t tell you is that a pill taken at 4 p.m. will still cause the grease from the burger you ate at 11 a.m. to come blowing out your ass at unexpected moments.

(Which, incidentally, is precisely why you need those dark colored sweatpants. Or a baking sheet to sit on and some gullible old woman who’ll proclaim it as a religious miracle.)

Oh, I know, I know: how gross is that? But, look, I happen to be a rather smart person — certainly smarter than Pavlov’s dogs — it only took one change of pants before I realized it might behoove me to move a TV tray and my laptop into the bathroom for the next hour or two.

But if you think that was gross then you should just stop reading now, because you don’t want to hear how very awesome it can make a fat girl feel to see all those drops of taco grease-like blobs of fat swimming around in the toilet rather than sticking around to lodge permanently on her ass and thighs.

So, fine, I’m gross. But I also got to enjoy that jalapeño and bacon cheeseburger for half the fat calories, so there. Besides, it’s not like I popped a pill dipped in 24-k gold and filled with gold leaf and then went mining in my toilet.

Sheesh.