If you think you’re overweight, nutritionists will tell you that one way to trim the fat is to write down everything you eat. This seemingly innocuous exercise can have hazardous results. It’s supposed to reveal that you eat a lot more than you ever thought possible, and hence shame you into trading in that afternoon bear claw for a couple of Wheat Thins. What it actually does is depress you to the point of convincing you that you can no longer live on just three meals a day, thus sending you on an unprecedented eating binge.

With me, it’s not food, it’s the Internet. The bear claws I can resist - ESPN.com is a different matter altogether. I began to realize my Web addiction when I came home from work recently to an empty house. For whatever reason, everyone was gone and I was home alone with nothing but silence, my DSL line, and the faint hum of my PC. “I don’t need to get on there,” I told myself. “I took care of email at work, there are no games to read about, and I already heard the news on the radio.” I decided to make a sandwich, find a comfortable chair, and read a book. You know, pre-Web stuff.

Before I knew what happened, I was in front of my computer with the sandwich on my lap, pricing new iPAQs on various retail websites. It was all by rote. Like when you drive home from work and don’t remember making the turns or pulling into the driveway, yet there you are. You do it so often out of habit that your mind is somewhere else when you actually go through the motions. That’s how it is with me and the Internet. Let me make something clear: I am not interested in a new iPAQ. I have a perfectly good one that I use every day. I don’t even know where the idea of pricing new iPAQs came from. I might as well have been pricing new mansions in Bill Gates’ neighborhood - I’m just relaying the experience as best I remember it.

My name is Ken, and I am an Internet junkie. But I’m not alone. According to a survey conducted by Conifer Research, there are a lot of us out there. Conifer wanted to find out how regular Web surfers coped without the Internet for a period of two weeks. Answer: not too well.

Turns out that people like me who rely heavily on the Internet for sports scores, news, shopping, weather, correspondence, and bidding on old baseball cards, have an emotional attachment to the Internet that’s as strong as many other emotional relationships in our lives. Take away that relationship for two weeks and we’re liable to become defensive, even hostile. The sponsors reported having had a particularly difficult time finding people to participate in the exercise because no one was willing to give up their Internet access for that long. Microwave, no problem. Clothes dryer, haul it away. Internet access? You can’t be serious.

Respondents in the study said they felt lost and disconnected, out of the loop because many of their personal relationships are supported by online emails and chats. Lose the chat and you might miss a party, some choice gossip, or the latest political joke. I know we think of the Internet as primarily an online marketplace, but it’s really much more than that. How many newspapers have you subscribed to since you started reading them on the Web? (Not many.) Have you written more or fewer letters in the past five years than you did in the previous five? (Fewer.) Has your home Internet access risen or dropped in importance since you first went online? (Risen.)

Conspicuously missing from the Conifer report is any kind of a value judgment. They report the findings, but say nothing about their moral implications. I happen to think the prominence of the Internet in so many of our lives is not a bad thing. After all, in its rawest form, the Internet is simply a vast information bank. What you do with that information is your business, but I’m of the mind that the more information we can access, the better off we are. So the good news is that the Internet gives you a lot of information at your fingertips, and you can use that information to build relationships and, in general, improve your life. Once you do, you can sit back, smile, and thank heaven that no one is asking you to give it up for two weeks.

 And then go treat yourself to a bear claw.