First, gain the 40 pounds. Refuse to recognize the dramatic deceleration of your metabolism. Get a glamorous Manhattan media job that demands expense-account schmoozing over boozy multicourse marathons at Zagat’s temples. Search every Parisian arrondisement for the definitive pain au chocolat. Use food, rather than nicotine, narcotics, or religion, as the defense against despair. Use food, rather than nicotine, narcotics, or religion, as the expression of joy. Use food as a way of displaying the sophistication that elevates you above your family’s crude, immigrant roots. Use food to hearken to the enveloping warmth of your family’s embrace. Fail to acknowledge that a brownie is a far more caloric evocation of childhood than Proust’s Madeleine.

Second, lose the 40 pounds. Begin with this inspiring vision: Go to Laguna Beach. Stare at the guy in his mid-60s with white chest hair holding his own in two-on-two volleyball with a muscular trio of bethonged SoCal goddesses. Fixate on him as your new role model, proclaiming, “I will be like that in 30 years.” Look in the bathroom mirror at your first gray hairs (chest and temple) realizing that you’re moving closer to the Beach Guy in only one way.

Return to the gym after months away, only to realize that the gym has been evicted because the landlord hoped to lure a tech company to pay a higher rent. Snicker knowingly that the joke is on him. Think about walking, then drive over the hills to your old neighborhood, where the local gym is still open. Accept an hour session with a personal trainer included gratis with the membership. Discover that the trainer is a former opera singer (in Italy, no less). Imagine the culturally rich conversations you’ll have between bouts of weightlifting and stretching. Buy a package of 10 sessions (three per week—Monday, Wednesday, Friday), then another and another. Keep a daily food diary for her review. Worry that she’ll chastise you for the occasional brownie or cookie or steak or tiramisu. (She doesn’t.) Nod vigorously when, every time, she says “more vegetables!”

Search for a painless way to eat more veggies. Settle on soups as the most savory. Buy a Daily Soup cookbook and a 10-gallon stockpot. Despair about eating the same roasted eggplant-tomato soup for eight consecutive meals. Find a gourmet grocery over the hill that puts out four different vegan soups every morning. Pick the stews that have beans in them (black, white, pinto, lentil) to thicken the broths and add fiber, which makes you absorb food more slowly and feel full faster and longer. Consume a pint a day. Ratchet up to two pints plus a pint of brown rice to complete the protein chain. Feel surprisingly sated. Spend afternoons and evenings bloated and gaseous. Alienate and anger your girlfriend with your conspicuous flatulence. Avoid all social engagements so you don’t fart away your other friendships. Shun restaurants and dinner parties. Stay home on Saturday night munching Kellogg’s All-Bran. Eat water-packed tuna directly from the can (while standing at the counter in the kitchen) as a protein boost. Pound down hard-boiled egg whites, six at a time, as though you’re Arnold.

Lose two pounds a week, sometimes three, but no more. Tell your friends who think you’re in love with your trainer because she’s young and überfit and stylish in that Haight Street hippie chick/club kid kind of way that they underestimate your willpower. Realize that your forceful emotions for your trainer are more like “transference” for a shrink who gives you so much care and close attention: How can you not feel grateful and give her credit when your results are so swift?

Go to L.A. after four months to have lunch with a studio executive, who invites you to the deli on the top floor of Barney’s. Arrive a half-hour early, since you were afraid of traffic, and kill time by gazing at the Armani. Let the salesmen convince you to try some on. Realize that you now have the body for sleek fashion. Drop a month’s rent on clothing. Buy a new belt. Keep on souping for three more months. Realize that the Armani blazer is now so big on you that you seem like a child wearing his father’s coat. Get beyond the final smallest notch of the new belt. Feel a mixture of resentment (that the expensive clothing was such a waste) and exhilaration. Turn 36 and realize that you now weigh less than when you were 26. Try to feel happy even though it’s wrenchingly sad to think of the lost decade you spent burdened by excess fat. Go on a hike at Big Sur. Finally beat your bionic girlfriend up a big hill. Lay off the bran and the beans. See if your old friends still remember you.

How To Cook Healthy Soups

1. Start with an onion. This is good advice for almost any recipe. 

2. Chop the hell out of it. Go ahead and cry; it’s a touching scene. 

3. Sweat the onion in a little olive oil, which will be the only fat content in the soup. Fragrant and cholesterol- free, olive oil is the most benign of fats. You can sweat some other aromatic chopped vegetables, like celery, garlic, and carrots, but the onion will suffice if that’s all you’ve got. 

4. After a few minutes add in a mixture of herbs and spices; thyme is particularly good, and the cheaper, dried variety from the spice rack works well if you haven’t picked any fresh from your garden in Provence lately. Cayenne pepper is the best way to add potent heat (just a quarter-teaspoon or you’ll be dialing 911). 

5. After stirring in the spices, dump in two quarts of water and a 28-ounce canister of plum tomatoes. If the can is from Italy’s San Marzano region or one of California’s organic farms, it will be tastier and far less hassle than blanching and seeding fresh tomatoes.

6. Next, add the guest star of ingredients: whatever vegetable-du-jour will provide the soup’s distinctive flavor. Simmer slowly for half an hour to an hour, stirring occasionally, so the ingredients have time to exchange phone numbers. I like to use small roasted cubes of eggplant with their exotic purple skins intact. If you throw in an orgy of veggies and some noodles you can call it minestrone, which sounds fancy but means simply “big soup.” 

7. If the broth is too thin, purée a ladlefull in a food processor or blender, then toss it back in the stockpot. Expect a total of around eight servings, though you'll surely eat two at a time. It will taste even better the next day, after sitting in the fridge. Beware, though: The common wisdom that soup is less flatulence-inducing over time is a dangerous myth. A super crunchy saleswoman at my local natural foods emporium sold me a $40 container of "powerful" enzyme pills to deflate me, but they had no demonstrable effect, which I discovered that evening at a fancy coctail party. Excuuuuse me. –A.D.