Checking briefly after the second full day of my test of "The Southe Beach Diet."

Down another pound — 3 1/2 in two days. Pretty satisfying.

And — I cheated — perhaps a half cupful of macaroni I dumped into some lamb-based spaghetti sauce. I'm not technically allowed any starch the first two weeks. I also gnawed on a frozen pizza crust my son left behind.

Which reminds me how I gained the unwanted 30 pounds inthe first place — feeding my babies, eating the crusts they wouldn't eat. All those toasted cheese sandwiches a dozen years ago.

This diet seems legitimate to me. The author is Arthur Agatson, a Florida cardiogist who wanted a diet his patients could stay on. So he designed one himself.

How successful? The book is ranked #8 on the Amazon sales list. A true best-seller. Compare that to my best-selling book, "The New Why Teams Don't Work": #51,015.

The regimen is a loose derivation of the high-protein "Atkins" style of diet, loose because he sees some carbs and fats as OK and others as not OK.

If this works, fantastic. Isn't it odd that for 50 years doctors pursued a nutritional model which didn't work — the Food Matrix, with an emphasis on reducing fats?

Gosh, if they can be so wrong about something with which they had multitudinous evidence — what else can they boot?