South Beach

OK, I'm going to try something.

As has been mentioned here and observed in person by quite a few people, I'm fat. Not just a few pounds overweight, either; I'm in the range usually described as "morbidly obese." At my worst -- a figure I've backed away from a little -- I could stand to lose about half my body weight in order to be in the healthy-to-acceptable range. This isn't something I'm particularly proud of, but it's a fact.

Lately I've been thinking about a few other facts: that heart disease, diabetes and various cancers run rampant in my family; that excess weight is often a contributor to infertility in women; that I made a promise to my Creator to take care of the body He gave me, and I haven't been very good at keeping that promise. I'm 40 years old, and increasingly I've been feeling the impression that I'm running on borrowed time. I don't like that feeling.

I also don't ordinarily feel comfortable telling people when I go on a diet. It's just something I feel awkward sharing. That's not to say I haven't gone on diets before -- I have dieted on and off since I was twelve. It's just that when you have as much weight to lose as I do (100+ pounds), it's difficult to stick to a Spartan diet plan for the long haul. Most people could handle four to eight weeks of diet modification, but could you sustain the sensation of deliberately denying yourself the things you enjoy, feeling weak and hungry for the better part of two years? (That's about how long I reckon this will take.) Suffice to say that my diet experiences tend to end in failure; maybe that's part of why I don't like talking about them.

When Mom was here, she joined me in the first week of a fairly restricted diet regimen. Although we both lost weight, we agreed that this, too, wouldn't be a viable program over the long haul. And yet in the process, I recognized something that many other people have learned and mentioned: namely, when you have someone else going on the diet with you, you're far less likely to fall off the wagon. That original regimen, however, definitely isn't for me; I'm too much of a foodie to treat food strictly as fuel.

That realization brought me around to exploring the South Beach Diet. It seems nutritionally sound and appears to be a regimen I could live with -- not just for two years, but for good, which is more or less the point. Not only have I asked the virile and manly Captain Midnight to go on this diet with me, I'm also mentioning it here in the hope that you'll hold me to it. The idea here is that more accountability might lead to greater success.

Cross your fingers. Here we go.