My wife and I call it the dumbest show we love to watch. There's something about NBC's Tuesday night offering in reality television that makes it tough to keep your finger on the remote.

She credits the heart-warming stories of emotional agony and physical stress, the lovable contestants with "wide" backgrounds, the ongoing saga of the human spirit's triumphant over the glutinous ways of the flesh.

I like it just because it makes me feel better about my expanding waistline. Overweight? Surely not, compared with Mr. Refrigerator and Miss Tub-Grinder. Come to think of it, I will have another bowl of ice cream.

For whatever reasons, we never seem to miss it. And whenever a new season starts, I have a pretty good knack in predicting which fatty is likely to drop the most weight over the first month or so.

All I do is identify the most bloated, out-of-shape guy or gal to abuse the scale. The bigger they are, the faster they drop that initial lard.

Indeed, the same rule goes a long way in explaining way cattle carcass weights have been falling like a load of bricks since mid October. For example, in just four weeks fed steers went from a record average of 870 pounds to 847, from being 13 pounds over the 3-year average to 8 under.

This extraordinary successful "diet" (i.e., it's not unusual to lose 23 pounds plus between late winter and late spring, but hardly in 30 days) must give much of the credit to tardy third quarter marketing that created a bumper crop of monster carcasses and week after week of ugly discounting by cattle buyers.

Sometime in late September or early October the great feedlot purging began, and when that messy process was over, cattle weights began to fall like a lead pipe. To be sure, cold and soggy weather last month also played a role in stripping away feedlot finish. Yet I think the extreme arc of the downward swing is primarily related to how big late summer cattle got to begin with.

The fact that the feeding sector is now so current as it moves into the uncertainties of winter suggests great bullish potential. Yet, just as every brave contestant in "The Biggest Loser" knows the tough difference between takin' it off and keepin' it off, beef producers sadly realize that supply is just half the battle.

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(AG)