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And it shows. I was never overweight as a kid. I didn't eat a lot of junk food in high school, but that's when I discovered Linden's chocolate chip cookies in the cafeteria. By the time I became an executive at Paramount, they were delivering chocolate chip cookies to the office.

I love snacking. And snacks were everywhere. There were potato chips and popcorn in the office, pretzels and peanuts on the plane, chocolates waiting in my hotel room when I arrived. Let's not talk about the minibar. And we haven't even gotten to the social breakfasts, lunches, and dinners that go along with the job.

I hate scales. Always have. My mother, the queen of the less-than-subtle hint, gifted me each Christmas with a beautifully wrapped . . . scale. After the first year (this went on for more than ten years), I stopped opening the "present."

Dostoyevsky once wrote that every man lies to himself. At the very least, we're in serious denial when it comes to diet and exercise. I fooled myself into thinking that, given my lack of serious food vices -- and all things being relative, my excess weight was an acceptable trade-off.

Apparently, I wasn't alone. More than 30 percent of adults in America are obese, and the number who are overweight has tripled in the last twenty years. We are addicted to junk food, and, worse, our national food supply is the number one source of chronic disease.

I fit perfectly into some pretty scary statistics, many related directly to my travel schedule. A friend once told me that you should never eat anything served to you out of a window unless you're a seagull. And yet, the odds that an American will eat at a fast-food restaurant on any given day are one in four. Well, I did better than that. Three out of four days, you could find me at an airport, or in a rental car on assignment on the road, pulling off the highway long enough to get supersized. And on that fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh day? I was eating out, at a hotel or a restaurant. Again, I was in trouble: That hotel or restaurant meal was 170 percent larger than a meal prepared at home. Odds that a person will closely follow a diet are, again, one in four. That was me as well (I was one of the other three). Then there were statistics that were not even close to describing me: The amount the average American spends annually on candy is $84. (I was spending at least ten times that amount.)