Welcome to the Good, the Fat and the Hungry. I'm Karla and I have been -- or am -- all those things. Here, I will share with you my lifelong struggle with my weight and I hope you'll follow along on with my determined attempt to lose nearly 40 pounds. I promise to tell you every win and setback along the way every Tuesday and Friday.

Hi. My name is Karla and I am an addict.

I'd heard this line a thousand times. In support of a friend in recovery, I would go to NA and AA meetings with him and in my own way feel superior to those unfortunates who'd let any substance derail their hopes, dreams and destroy their families. I would secretly look down my nose at them and think, what a shame.

My friend died two years ago. Even though he was well-educated, had been a pastor, husband and father of five, he'd say his greatest accomplishment was living his last years clean and sober.

Shortly before he died, I took him to a meeting to collect his seven-year sobriety chip. I listened as other people shared their stories. This night was different because I began to see that my behavior with food at times was akin to that of an addict.

Compulsive text messaging, urges to get online and surf the web, cravings to play video games... What do all of these activities have in common? They're practices people do on the Internet, and one doctor says psychiatrists should recognize it as a bona fide mental illness.

Technology certainly has made things easier to get work done. But it can also be a great distraction to "unplug" from the rest of the world. After all, have you ever looked at your watch and gotten online to check your email, only to realize hours have passed in what seemed like minutes? Making time fly is one thing, but a doctor from the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland says this habit can be taken a step further to addiction.

According to Dr. Block, getting hooked on the web has all the same traits of a typical "offline" addiction: withdrawal and tolerance and requiring more time to get the same satisfaction, for example. He also says that 86 percent of Internet addicts have other mental illnesses -- so I'm wondering if those traits contribute to this computer-aided dependency. Either way, it'll be interesting to see if psychiatrists diagnose "web addiction" in the future.

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Most consumers like to be aware of potential risks associated with their investments. If you're a patient, and you look at yourself as a consumer of medical practices, you'd probably want to be aware of any risks associated with a particular doctor, right?

Well, the case of addiction among physicians is prompting California to reconsider a confidentiality program that enables these doctors to get rehab in secrecy, and still practice medicine. Now we are not talking about a huge number of doctors: only about 1 percent in the entire US, actually. But you wouldn't know if your doctor was in that 1 percent or not, even if he had botched an operation in the past.

Opponents of this secrecy program say that rehabilitation is not helping doctors get better, nor is it looking out for the interests of the patients. But due to the confidential nature of this whole issue, it's hard to tell what's working and what's not. It could be that some doctors with addictions are very successful at rehab! Even so, the ones who aren't successful wouldn't be required to disclose it, and patients would still be putting their trust (and money) into the hands of these medical professionals. It's a question that is sure to garner heated attention in the future, possibly closer to July when California's program ends. If no alternative system is put in place, then the state will revert back to zero-tolerance and begin pulling medical licenses.

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Recently I came across this very interesting article in the New York Times about a woman who was seemingly addicted to water -- she would carry several water bottles with her everywhere, never going more than a few minutes without a drink and making frequent visits to the bathroom. Overnights she would even drink, sometimes more than a gallon, before morning.

The scary thing is that she had been that way as long as she could remember but had never understood why -- it took a doctor taking a special interest when when she was 38 years old and in the hospital for something else to finally solve the mystery.

For that woman the issue was a hormonal deficiency and the fix was as simple as a daily nose-spray prescription. But can a person actually be addicted to water? According to the article the answer is yes -- it's called psychogenic polydipsia and it's defined as an uncontrollable compulsion to drink, usually due to mental illness.

And to think that most have a hard time making ourselves enough water!

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According to this, smokers who are trying to kick the nicotine habit need to be treated like addicts hooked on a drug like heroin. Doctors say that those trying to quit smoking need to be given a product that provides a hit of nicotine as strong as one they'd get from a cigarette, much the same way that heroin addicts use methadone to quit that drug.

The article points out some scary statistics -- 100 million people died in the last century due to the negative effects of smoking cigarettes, 150 million will likely die over the next 20 years and a whopping 1 billion people are projected to die of smoking-related causes in the 21st century.

Unfortunately, those who want to quit only have access to products like nicotine gum or the patch, which deliver low doses of the drug, rather than the kind of fix a smoker would get from a cigarette. The solution? The piece mentions that better cigarette substitutes need to be developed to give smokers a better chance of kicking the habit.

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So everybody knows that consistency is the key to lasting and successful weight loss and fitness. Whatever your goals are, intermittent and random efforts here and there aren't going to get you anywhere other than frustrated. You'll feel like you're doing something but you won't see any results, which will then lead you to feel like it's a hopeless cause and give up. At least until the next time you get all revved up and jump in for another effort or two, and the cycle starts all over again.

So how to bust the vicious circle and actually stick with it, permanently? You've got to get addicted. I've been really busy for the last few weeks and my workout routine has kinda gone by the wayside. Well, not kinda, more like totally. Now I won't say that I'm addicted to exercise just yet, but I have definitely missed it! I'm a little surprised by that, to be honest. I just started working out regularly and for real within the last year, so I'm not someone who has always been into it by any means. So I can say, from my own perspective anyway, that it is possible! I'm going to be getting back into my routine by the end of this week hopefully, and maybe I'll end up end up addicted before too long. Here are some tips and tricks to help you on your road to addiction (sounds funny to say with a positive meaning, but its true!):

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