About ten years ago my friend Micheál, who was then also my doctor, put me on a diet. Since I had given up the fags (about ten years before that) I had put on a fairly steady growth about the waist and he told me that I was not improving my health by carrying on like this.
I then bought the Weight Watcher books and stuck to a fairly steady diet plan. After three months I succeeded in losing one and a half stone and there I stuck. The doc was encouraging, I had improved my health and, should I stick to the regime I would likely continue to stave off the dangerous levels of obesity.
And so I did, at least for the next for five years, until we moved to France
But then my fondness for cooking in butter and cream began to creep back into my diet and because I was now weighing myself in kilos I had no particular reference point to relate to my previous bulk.
I also became adept at arguments like; if I am going to have to forswear butter and cream for ever from my diet am I going to lose all of my pleasure in eating?
Then I signed on to the medical system over here and my French doctor in his turn began to complain about the Dwyer Bulk.
Something was going to Have To Be Done.
Then in Ireland over Christmas my son-in-law (a lath on legs) innocently started to talk about this new Swedish died he had heard about. They recommended forswearing all carbohydrates and, they had by this method managed to allow a high proportion of Swedish diabetics to reduce sufficient weight to come off their medication.

Then a friend’s son, a football player, was put on this diet by his coach when the inactivity caused by a broken leg had caused him to put on weight, he swore it was working well for him.

The final straw was when I read in the Independent that Lucinda O Sullivan, their formidable food critic, had managed to lose four stone in as many months by going on what she called a wheat free diet. (She did mention however that she had also given up potatoes, rice and pasta)

When we came back home to France in January I determined that I was going to give this diet a chance- it had, as far as I was concerned, a lot going for it principally I suppose that it was the opposite of the fat control diet which I had, at this point lost all relish in.
Sile, out of fellowship I feel rather than need, agreed to go along with me.
Now I have always been a person who believed that compensations and rewards to self, if one is making sacrifices, are a positive way to ensure that one keeps it up.
I tackled cigarette withdrawal with massive amounts of nicotine patches, extra-strong mints and strong coffee and it worked.
My annual dry November is sweetened by copious quantities of non-alcohol beers and as many exotic fruit juices as I can find.
We agreed that to tailor this directly to our needs we would lay a couple of ground rules.
Number one was that, rather than forever eschewing the spud and the bread we would have one blow out day in the week where these would be allowed.

Number two was that we would contrive still to make our meals as interesting as possible, adding extra veg in place of the missing starch, being prepared to cook with butter and cream etc.

We started this regime in mid-January and now, six weeks later I feel sufficiently confident in its efficacy to give a progress report.
The principal success of this diet is that I haven’t felt hungry while on it- the counting calories of weight watchers left me constantly hungry, cranky and generally low. If I do feel hungry I can (and do) nibble on a chunk of cheese- much more likely to bring the stomach to heel than a raw carrot.

Another secondary positive is that by forswearing carbs you also eat less fat- what good is butter, after all, without a spud or a slice of bread to help it down.
Breakfasts (especially for a putative Frenchman) are probably the most difficult area but eggs, bacon and kippers are allowed (and indeed are eaten) and (inspired by the excellent breakfast offered in a hotel in the Loire in which we stayed at Christmas time) we have discovered a delicious mixture of Fresh Goat’s Cheese, Honey and Walnuts (and/or indeed fruit) which sets us up a treat.
The rest of the day’s meals are really no trouble for a reasonably competent cook- using a slice of tomato or cucumber as a shovel for your pate, and the glories of cabbage with ginger with your curry and then with bacon and juniper with the roast pork are easy tricks.
The interesting news is that by this pain free method (at least to me) I have so far lost four and a half kilos, or roughly three quarters of a kilo a week, nice and steady going like the best diets should be.
I said to Sile this morning that my principal worry is that if I keep this up, in three years’ time I will disappear into thin air (but somehow this I think is not likely.)