Ladies: It's time to get in shape for swimsuit season! If you start a program of diet and exercise NOW, in just a few weeks you can shed that extra 10 pounds, so when it's time to "hit the beach," you can put on that new bikini with the confidence that comes from knowing that you will immediately take off that new bikini, put on a bathrobe and spend the rest of the weekend in your bedroom, weeping and eating Haagen-Dazs straight from the container.

Because, let's face it, 10 pounds is not going to get the job done. Not these days, when the strict bodily standards set by super-models and top Hollywood stars dictate that no woman is supposed to weigh more than her lipstick.

How do these celebrities stay so impossibly thin? Simple: they have full-time personal trainers who advise them on nutrition, give them pep talks and shoot them with tranquilizer darts whenever they try to crawl, on hunger weakened limbs, toward the packet of rice cakes that constitutes the entire food supply in their 37,000 square-foot mansions. For most celebrities, the biggest meal of the day is toothpaste. (They use reduced-fat Crest.)

But you don't have a personal trainer, which means you have to rely on willpower. And of course you don't HAVE any willpower. If you did, you'd be doing stomach crunches right now, instead of reading this worthless column. But here you sit, lump-like, while the millions of fat cells in your thighs mate furiously and give birth to gigantic litters.

Perhaps you are thinking: "But the super-thin look is out! The fashion industry recently declared that larger sizes were fashionable! Even Vogue magazine ran a photo spread wherein some of the models were normal human females!"

No offense, but: You moron. This is a TRICK, a prank that the fashion industry plays every few years. It causes millions of normal-sized women to go to the chic clothing stores, looking to buy the clothes they see in Vogue, only to discover that the fashion industry makes these clothes only for mutant women who wear size zero or lower.

"I'm sorry, but we don't have that in your size," you will be told by the snotty 78-pound salesperson, who enters and leaves the store via the mail slot. "You might try across the street, at Big Betty's Duds for Whales."