A couple of decades or more ago -- when I was a kid -- my father smoked. Two packs a day, in fact. Non-filters. Pall Mall, as I recall.

And then, one day, he stopped.

He just threw the pack out and never picked them up again, never looked back. Cold turkey. No tapering off, no escape routes, no exceptions. No patches, no antidepressants, nothing. Threw them out, kaput, endgame. He genuinely believed that the way he did it was the only way to go. (This, after all, was an era when painless dentistry had not yet been invented.)

We now know, of course, that while that's certainly one way to stop smoking, there are other ways to do it. They may not be such clean breaks, but they may ease the pain of withdrawal a bit (or prolong the agony, depending on how you look at it), and, in fact, there is a now an entire menu of possibilities when it comes to stopping any addiction. Programs, discussion groups, 12-step models, psychotherapy, patches, prescription drugs, you name it.

But food is a different animal. The alcoholic, the drug addict and the nicotine addict all have one thing in common. They can live without their drug of choice. (Whether they are able to is a different story.) But food? Ah, now you're in a whole different galaxy. You can live quite nicely without alcohol, cigarettes or drugs, but you cannot live without food. Unlike the craving for alcohol, the craving for food -- hunger -- will not go away, and if you ignore it long enough, you die.