AS of this week I've put my wife on a diet. Well, that's not quite right but I enjoy the gasp and wide eyes when I say that to people who know us. The fact is that as of this week I am on a diet and my wife has decided to join me.
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I have a beer-drinking cyclist's obsession with diet, in that I want to drink beer and I want to stay in the same postcode as my cycling mates when we're riding, and take my word for it that just three or four kilograms of extra body weight makes a huge difference. It's not the extra weight on the bike, as I understand it, but the blood's reduced capacity to absorb oxygen.
No, I'm not just three or four kilograms overweight. The official BMI charts have me at least 20kg overweight, which is nonsense, but at 96kg I have 10kg to lose to be at what has been my leanest and meanest since I moved on from the lanky, angular 20s.
Before I developed a boozing cyclist's obsession with weight 15 years ago I had a boozing runner's obsession with weight, so I've come to see myself as something of an authority on diets. On fad diets, my dietitian daughter likes to point out. I especially like to issue advice to fat friends when I'm slimmish – coffee for breakfast, salad for lunch and you can drink and eat what you like from 5 o'clock, I tell them – but I don't have the gall when I'm bellied. Experiencing again the rush of that sanctimony is another incentive to lose weight.
My first diet was spectacularly successful. I was 35 and I jumped on the fat-free wagon, losing 13kg in six weeks. Later I read that the second bout of fat-free dieting would never be as successful as the first, and it wasn't, so I moved with the fashion of the times.
Over the next 30 years I worked my way through at least the Pritikin diet, the soup diet, the grapefruit diet (lasted just a few days), the calorie-counting diet, the paleo diet, the 5:2 diet, meal-replacement shakes and, most recently, the blood-sugar diet. The Mediterranean diet didn't seem much different from my usual, the give-up-the-grog diet was just too hard, and the CSIRO's Total Wellbeing Diet required too long a commitment. I mean, I want a flat stomach in a month, two at a stretch.
The most successful diet was the slop I had to try to swallow during radiation treatment to my throat 13 years ago, when I lost 15kg in three weeks or so, coincidentally the same weight loss the Newcastle Herald's Ian Kirkwood experienced with similar treatment for throat cancer last year.
As you'd expect after so many years of evaluation, I deliberated long and hard in selecting our current diet. First, I read a report in this paper a month ago about the involvement of Newcastle University nutrition professor Clare Collins in an ABC Television series testing four diets, and while I knew about the 5:2, the paleo and the flexitarian diets, the ketogenic diet was new to me.
Second, I googled ketogenic and learnt that by giving up bread, potato, pasta, rice, fruit, sugar and other high-carb food, and by eating lots of fat and protein and salad and vegetables, I would force my body to use its fat stores for energy.
Deal! I planned to wait until the mango, persimmon and fig trees in my backyard stopped fruiting and until I could persuade my wife to stop making cakes, biscuits, brownies and such, but when I popped the button on my shorts a few days ago I knew the time was nigh.
As I write now, on the kitchen island bench beyond my reach is a magnificent banana and orange syrup cake and a coconut and cherry cake, and we've been freezing mango cheeks and baking our figs in our backyard honey and freezing them unsampled. (Figs picked when they're truly ripe, drizzled with honey and caramelised in the oven cannot be matched.) In the brewery are several kegs of the world's best beer, but there's not much carbohydrate in beer, you know.
It's been going well but tonight we're having a family pizza night so we'll have to ask Mr Ketogenic for a couple of hours' leave.
Just how long, I hear you ask with a mocking edge, do you intend to keep this up, fatso?
A couple of months, maybe, then I'm going to try to keep it off with my breakfast-coffee-lunch-salad plan or a 6:1 version of the 5:2 diet, or whatever's the fad at the time.
I'm proof that fad diets have a lot going for them. With fad diets I'm fat just half the time.
I especially like to issue advice to fat friends when I'm slimmish – coffee for breakfast, salad for lunch and you can drink and eat what you like from 5 o'clock, I tell them – but I don't have the gall when I'm bellied. Experiencing again the rush of that sanctimony is another incentive to lose weight.
