By JANE LOTTER

Author's Note: As we move into the holiday season, with its butter cookies, cheesecake, and coffee amaretto with whipped cream, it may help to remember that ours is not the first generation to fight the battle of the bulge. Hemingway and the Lost Generation - mistakenly referred to by some scholars as the "Pepsi Generation" - were there before us, as witnessed in the following fragments of a Hemingway manuscript, recently found in my recycling bin.

Then one day I discovered a health food restaurant called Harry's Bar on a little street in Lake City. It was a clean, well-lit place with good, honest, fat-free food and I went back to our flat and told my wife about it over a diet soda and a Weight Watcher's frozen entree.

"Oh," she said. "I'm so happy. Do they have low-sodium specials, and folie à deux with steamed veggies, and mineral water, and carry-out food?"

"Sure," I said. "Eat it there or take it away."

"My," she said. "The pounds will melt off."

She was right, of course. My head felt like wood and I should have hit it just for luck. But I didn't. Instead my wife and I went together into the kitchen and rummaged as one for Cheez Doodles and a six-pack, and ate some leftover strudel that Gertrude Stein had made for Picasso, and must have each consumed over 5,000 calories that day and didn't give a darn. The next day we sobered up and vowed we would always be happy and always be together and always watch our weight by eating at Harry's Bar.

After that, we dined regularly at Harry's and each time was magical and we always got our same table and we never ever talked with our mouths full. And by the end of the winter we had each lost five pounds.

But then, one day, you discover another little place where the food isn't fat-free or honest, and it isn't clean or well-lit. The tables are dark and the potatoes are deep-fried. But you keep going back just the same and you always ask to sit in this one waitress's section and you could kick yourself for it. And just when you're about to walk out because the waitress is not trulymacha, she offers you Italian food.

"So," you say to her, "you have calzones after all."

"Yes," she answers, "and there's a dessert tray in the back."

Before long you are stuffing your face with cappelletti and tortellini, and flagging down a bus boy for more garlic bread, and putting on weight where it shows. And you could die from the heartburn.

So you go home to think things through by helping your wife fix a reduced-calorie lunch. You make soup simply, as from a can of Campbell's Healthy Request, and slice celery and carrot sticks, and the way one person makes an open-face veggie sandwich differs from the way somebody else makes it.

But there is never any ending to hunger when you're trying to keep the weight off. For hunger is a moveable beast - or perhaps a tiny gerbil - you carry around with you, clawing at your insides. That is why, in later years, we always went back to Harry's Bar, no matter how snugly our jeans fit or with what ease or difficulty we could fit behind a table. Harry's was always worth it and we always ordered the veggie plate. But that's how Harry's was in the early days when we were very happy and very hungry.

END

Jane Lotter lives in Maple Leaf.