I saw the movie Twilight this weekend. Now, I realize that movie is geared towards people half my age and with two less testicles, but I went with a good female friend so it's not quite as gay as it sounds.

I actually thought it was pretty okay. I mean, the story was not really all that great, and apparently we still haven't mastered the CGI effect of people moving through the air gracefully, but I thought it was still interesting enough. I won't end up reading the books but I'll probably check out the sequel.

One of the big themes of the movie was something I've been thinking a lot about lately and that is the idea of temptation and not giving into it. This is beyond obvious but I feel like the biggest roadblock to success in losing weight is how we handle dealing with temptation. Part of temptation is actual hunger, but it goes beyond that as well. If you're on the Atkins diet, say, at some point your going to be like, "Sweet christ I just want to have some pancakes!" And it's not a matter of being hungry, it's just a matter of being denied something so that thing becomes so much more attractive.

So the first way I go about managing temptation is by not having any rules. If nothing is off limits, it no longer has the allure of the forbidden. But of course you can't just eat as much as you want of whatever you want and lose weight. So you have to not only trust your common sense, but follow it as well. Sure, you can have a cheeseburger and fries for lunch if you go a little lighter on dinner. You know all the rules about losing weight because you've read all the articles that do nothing more than restate these rules for the last 50 years.

But even with no set rules in place, you're still going to have to deal with temptation. One cookie for dessert will sound good, but 18 will sound so much better. This is the kind of temptation you don't want to give into. You want to train yourself to be satisfied with one cookie. I believe you can do this, just like you can raise and lower your tolerance for alcohol depending on how much you drink. So you eat that one cookie and now it's up to you to manage the temptation for more. This is all a mental game. And you get good at it by inviting the temptation and then not succumbing to it.

In his essay, Compensation, Ralph Waldo Emerson talked about the Sandwich Islanders and their belief that the strength and valor of the enemies they killed would become their own. In much the same way, Emerson wrote, "We gain the strength of the temptations we resist." This is a notion that has helped me out a lot. I believe you should put yourself in a position to fail so that you can gain strength by not giving into temptation. If you're someone who eats half a dozen donuts in the morning, go to Dunkin Donuts and get one, eat it, and leave. You'll feel like a normal human, and you'll gain a lot more strength by doing that than by avoiding Dunkin Donuts altogether.