Before you open the lunch menu or order that cheeseburger or consider eating the cake with the frosting intact, haul out the psychic calculator and start tinkering with the budget.

I go to a restaurant with a group of women and pray that we can order lunch without falling into the semi-covert business of collective monitoring, in which levels of intake and restraint are aired, compared, noticed: 'What are you getting? Is that all you're having? A salad? Oh, please.'

We are in this for the long haul. This menu has great breadth. And we have been ... getting the response we hoped for. We are seeing a lot of people for the first time, and then they are coming back.

This is a start. It's like eating a piece of cake. There's a whole cake out there to eat. We ate one piece of it today. We have to keep grinding if we want to eat the whole thing.

Before you get a dog, you can't quite imagine what living with one might be like; afterward, you can't imagine living any other way.

Academic achievement was something I'd always sought as a form of reward. Good grades pleased my parents, good grades pleased my teachers; you got them in order to sew up approval.