Fad diets and me...

"Dieting" is a thing I have literally never done. Never did I really pay attention to calories or carbs or any of that stuff.

I switched to diet sodas back in late '00 when I was rooming with Marko because that's what he drank and I was dead broke at the time and so that's what there was to mooch in the 'fridge. Once you get accustomed to diet soda, it's hard to go back to regular soda because it's so cloyingly sweet by comparison, so there was one source of calories removed from my diet without actually intending to do so.

Still, quitting smoking back in '13 or whenever caused my weight to balloon. Previously, the acts of drinking beer and smoking a cigarette had been so closely intertwined that I literally could not do one without the other. And since I couldn't smoke in the house, this limited beer drinking to those times I was sitting on the porch with a book and a cigarette. Decoupled from that habitual link, I could swill liquid carbohydrates whenever I wanted to, and I did.

When you're taking in enough calories to fuel the lifestyle of a farmhand or construction worker and only burning the calories of a sedentary gunwriter, there are consequences.

I knew that Marko was doing the keto diet thing, but it wasn't until he met me at the airport in Manchester in July that I saw how much weight he'd lost.

I don't know about me doing the full-on keto thing, but I pretty much cut out carbs and sugar as much as possible while I was in New Hampshire and lost a dozen pounds as a result. I knew I had eight pint cans of beer in the refrigerator here at Roseholme Cottage, so when I got home from the Granite State, I threw those in a cooler and took them along to Ohio for Paul-E-Palooza weekend and a Farewell to Carbs ceremony.

(A side effect of my dietary alteration: I used to go through sugar-free Tums like candy. I haven't had a trace of heartburn for a month now.)

There are now no beers in the fridge and there won't be until I've lost about another thirty pounds and established some kind of an exercise program above and beyond just walking around the block.
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