ABOUT THE BOOK So, you're on a diet. That's a great start, but you know how it goes, right? First come the exciting cookbooks and articles, then the planning and dreaming about diet goals (slimming down, bulking up, making just the right amount of muscle show - all the cliches). Then comes the diet itself, and suddenly those plans slam into a wall made out of hunger, boredom, late nights, and lost willpower. There's a reason people bounce around from diet to diet so often. Those delicious foods you've been accustomed to eating - from the bag of chips to the extra chicken nugget - are programmed into your body. When you stop following the old program, your digestive system and brain rally to complain, and suddenly you're tempted to return to the old balance by adding fats, sweets, salty snacks, and all those other tasty bites you're not supposed to eat. In other words, junk food happens. Here's the good news: not all junk food is manufactured to be equal. Even if you break your diet, you can break in the right way, and still eat fewer calories than before. Fewer calories equals weight lost, and you still win the diet game. The even better news? There are both psychological and scientific reasons why junk food can - maybe even should - be an important part of any basic diet. The key is proper planning, while making sure your junk food passes the right health tests. So when that old hungry feeling hits again, don't try to force it away. Set aside part of your diet to deal with it, because many junk foods will not really ruin your diet. Some snacks even have hidden health benefits, if you know what to look for. Adding a few hundred calories here and there may be one of the best food decisions you have every made. You'll be amazed what you can eat to satisfy your off-diet cravings while still losing those pounds! MEET THE AUTHOR Tyler Lacoma writes on business, environmental, and fitness topics, but squeezes in some time for fiction, too. He graduated from George Fox Uni