There was a time, not all that long ago, when I was fat. I had managed to sustain the illusion that I was really a thin man with a bit of a beer gut.

On a vacation trip about four years ago, I happened to pass a full-length mirror as I headed out the door to the beach in my swimming trunks and caught a glimpse of myself in profile. I put on a shirt and didn't take it off for the rest of the vacation.

Turns out I was fat. Jackie Gleason fat. Oliver Hardy fat. Not morbidly obese, but 50 pounds overweight. My feet hurt all the time, I could barely walk a mile without resting. I was developing a nasty problem with the left knee. And I had frequent heartburn. Every day around 2PM I'd have a little Zantac and Alka-Seltzer cocktail, as though it was the most normal thing in the world.

I got steered to reduced carbohydrate dieting. The Atkins craze was sort of cultish, so I looked into the science of ketogenic metabolism, insulinemia, and glycemic indexing. I started out by just cutting out all the white food, and switching to light beer (the hardest step). I lost seven pounds in one week.

Over the course of the next six months, as I got better at meal planning and monitoring my intake, I lost the 50 pounds. I also joined a gym during this time, and did a lot of weight training. But it worked. And I kept it off for three years.

Unfortunately, this last year or so I've gotten sort of lax in the low-carb discipline. I still use reduced carb substitute products when they are available (Dreamfields low-carb pasta is excellent, for example, as are Mission's low-carb tortillas), but I've been entirely content to eat bread, rice, muffins, cookies, etc. I've even been indulging in whole-grain craft beer from time to time, a real no-no. About the only thing I've been religiously avoiding is potatoes (an evil vegetable), although I've slipped up there a time or two.

So now I'm up 20 pounds, and today is the first day of Lent. So I'm getting back on the low-carb wagon, and going back to the gym. Between jumpstarting the metabolism with exercise and cutting out the starch, I think I can drop 20 in six weeks. Wish me luck.