DAY 9 ...

After nine days I have lost 9.5 pounds — from 226 to 116.5 lbs.

This makes me very happy. Happier still, because my original high weight, before starting the "South Beach Diet," was even higher — 238 (the scale only said that once, but ... wow, am I right)?

I look in the mirror for the first time in years. I was unable to really look before. Too painful psychically. Seriously — when I was heavy, which was for like 11 years, I lived in the twilight of denial.

But diabetes busted down the ability to keep denying. It dissolves your body. In my case, I began to literally rot in all the private dank places. Foot rot, crotch rot, pit rot, behind-the-ear rot. I felt like a corpse, like Lazarus.

More than you wanted to know, I know. It was very disturbing to me. I didn't know I had diabetes. I thought I was — melting.

So this diet was very wonderful for me. I am about to go "off" it for 3 weeks while I go on a car trip to Utah. I will be on the maintenance phase of it, though, with 16.5 pounds till to lose, I will hop back on the harsh phase for a few days as soon as I get back, and am able to abstain without going crazy.

Projection: I will lose the next 16.5 pounds more slowly — by summer's end.

I thank the diet but I thank other things as well, that came together for me pretty miraculously.

This sounds like a sports testimonial, but I thank God. I figured out a long time ago that I had a mild eating disorder — I just ate 5-10% more than I was supposed to — and I was unable to stop. I was awful at dieting, just awful. So I told the Great Spirit, "Listen, I'm no good at this. You're going to have to step in and take over." I can't prove I had divine help — no footprints in the sugarbowl — but it's a very odd coincidence, wouldn't you say?

Second, my wife Rachel is a nurse practitioner, and it was her idea that I try an Atkins-like diet. This goes back practically a year. I did for a while, a year ago, but I found I was eating mountains of pork rinds and oceans of grapefruit juice. [Shudder].

South Beach has many points in common with the Atkins diet — carbohydrate-aware, and not afraid of a little fat. This is key, I think. My "eating disorder" is really a kind of allergy to carbohyrates. The more starch I eat — crackers, beer, home-bread bread — the more I want to eat. So I have to draw a line in the sand on the stuff, for life.

Third, I started attending an Overeaters Anonymous group here in Saint Paul. The people are very sweet, and they have the goods — an understanding of why we eat crazy. They provided me with a rationale that makes it all work — the need to admit you can't do it yourself, and to place the task in the hands of a higher power. I would have been reluctant to come to this on my own — I have always prayed, but pessimistically. My sense of God was that of an absentee landlord. "I know this won't do any good, but ..."