The Godfreys et al.

I was sort of hoping to just show up in Arizona and show off my skinny self, but I guess the cat is out of the bag. I did the South Beach diet, which is low carbs and lowish fat. You’re pretty much allowed to eat all the protein and most vegetables you want, so there’s no real reason to ever be hungry. No potatoes, no rice, no bread, no pasta, no sugar, at least not at first. The first three weeks, you can’t have fruit or carrots or tomatoes, but you can integrate those back in in the next phase.

The idea is to eat foods with a low glycemic index, which is the rate at which your blood sugar increases after you eat it. The higher the number in the food you’re eating, the theory goes, the more your body registers an influx of excess energy that needs to be stored, so it stores away any extra it can and makes you hungrier for more of the same.

White bread is 100 on the scale, most beans are in the 40s, and green vegetables are all lower than 20. A baked potato seems to be the worst possible food, at 158. Even worse than french fries!

I lost about 15 pounds in the first month, and as I reintegrated other foods, the weight loss slowed. I’ve averaged about 5 pounds a month since then, which seems like a pretty good number to shoot for in order to not yoyo back.

Anyway, the diet is not really something you do and stop once you’re done. I’m moving now into the 3rd phase, which is: eat the same way you have been, but no foods are off limits. At this point, however, I pretty much know how, say, eating a bag of pretzels is going to affect my weight, so my diet changes are probably semi-permanent with occasional exceptions.

Jessica has been really great about supporting me with this. She’s the cook around these parts, and she’s come up with a lot of delicious meals that allow me to stick with the diet and eat well in every sense of the word. Thanks for the fantastic help, sweetheart!