In Which The South Beach Diet Cookbook Lay Abandoned On The Kitchen Counter

One of the few advantages to living abroad is you get to play delusional mind games with your weight. Allow me to elaborate:

As you may or may not know, seeing your weight in kilos is a lot less painful than seeing it in pounds, thus making it easier to fool yourself into a false sense of security. Even if you fancy yourself one of the smarter expatriates (which I do) and you readily reckon that 1 kilo is roughly equal to 2 pounds (which it is), you can still fairly easily content yourself with the....oh....say.....70ish kilos you see on the scales, because 70 x 2 is only 140, and 140 after three kids ain't half bad. Right?

Right.

Only problem is see, that the actual conversion isn't quite so clean cut. If you want to get all technical about it, you'd have to multiply that 70 by 2.2046, and I'm here to tell you that the .2046 starts to add up.

Go ahead, do the math. I'll wait.

...........oh, alright, FINE!

You lazy bastards! It's 154.322.

70 kilos adds up to 154.3 pounds.

Not quite so good, eh? And even worse if that '70ish' you were fumbling around is actually closer to 75...ish.

See where I'm going with this?

I knew that I had put on some weight over the past year. I was uncomfortable and unhappy with that fact, but it was only 5 or 6 kilos--barely 10 pounds--easily discarded if I ever decided to really buckle down and work at it. Then I got home and stepped on my mother's scales.

I nearly swallowed my tongue.

The diet started that very day. I went jogging. I skipped the potatoes at dinner. Had toast and grapefriut for breakfast the next morning. I was focused. Intent. Determined.

The next day I read the copy of The South Beach Diet my mother had kicking around and figured, "Three weeks no carbs? 10 to 20 pounds just like that? Doesn't sound so bad. I think I can manage that...."

That night at dinner I skipped both the potatoes and the breadsticks. Had ham and eggs for breakfast. Went jogging again. Focused. Intent. Determined.

I lost 5 pounds in the first 3 or 4 days.

Then there was pizza night. Followed shortly by taco night. Missy broke her leg. At one point, I really needed a beer for one reason or another. Things just lost focus, got decidedly blurry.

I remain quite faithful to the jogging. I went out and bought a pulse watch and have had a grand time tinkering around with that. Just last week I managed 5k in 35 minutes, which I realize isn't exactly competition ready, but it's a significant improvement over what I was capable of just over a month ago.

But, ya' know--Dr. Arthur Agatston and his South Beach Diet can go right ahead and kiss my carbified ass because life's just too damn short to go depriving yourself of pizza night!