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I just keep getting fatter and fatter. The other day I carelessly stepped on the scale (normally I try to avoid tripping over land mines) and discovered I’d gained another three pounds.

Even the dog is getting fat around this place. They say if you hang out with fat people, you get fat, too. Probably explains it: poor Cassie the Corgi now weighs almost 26 pounds. The vet thought she was a bit on the chunky side at 23 pounds.

Three pounds…that’s 13% of her normal weight. {sob!} I’m only 8% over my normal weight, if you assume a certain old-lady bagginess as “normal.”

Well. What to do about this dismal state of affairs…

I picked up my old Atkins diet book, whose regimen did work, a long time ago. But looking over it, I thought this is just too damned drastic. I suspect that putting your body into a state of ketosis can’t help but have some overall metabolic effects, some of them likely long-term. I’m getting too frail for antics like that. And as for the dog…why would an all-meat diet do anything but add weight on a nonobligate carnivore?

Fortunately, when you’ve been lumbering around the block since the early Cretaceous, you have a lot of experience to inform your present exploits.

Exempli gratia: Some years ago when I was still feeding my dogs kibble, I bought a new cup measure to dole the stuff out. I’d been using a one-cup Pyrex measuring cup. Each dog ate about a cup of kibble, plus a chaser of cooked meat. One day the glass cup broke, and I replaced it with a plastic measuring cup from the grocery store. It was about half the size of the Pyrex thing. Its markings were just little molded ridges in the plastic, not bright red enamel as on a Pyrex cup. Not being able to see the markings clearly, I assumed it was a one-cup measure.

Fast-forward a few months: The German shepherd resembles nothing more than a beer keg with feet sticking out. Sort of how I look now.

So I decide to put the hounds on a diet. In the course of making some English-major calculations to figure out what diet rations would amount to, I try to read the measures on the plastic scoop. Take my glasses off, hold the thing up to my nose…holy mackerel!

It wasn’t a one-cup measure. It was a two-cup measure. I’d been feeding the dogs twice as much as they were supposed to be getting!

Instantly I dropped them both back to their regular ration. Within about three months, they were back to their normal weight, and they stabilized there.

So. Let us extrapolate from animal experimentation to human healthcare:

Of late, I’ve noticed that every time I get up from the table, I feel like I have a bowling ball in my belly. Either something is very wrong—as in we don’t want to go there—or I’m just flat eating too much. Maybe, as I’m getting older and spending wayyyy too much time in front of the computer and way too little time hiking up and down mountains, just maybe I need less food than I’ve been eating. Maybe even lots less.

What would happen if, every time I went to dish up the chow, I put half as much on the plate as I’ve been in the habit of eating? And what if each day I drank exactly half as much of the caloric drinks I favor?

So, for breakfast, instead of the usual two pieces of bacon, two pieces of toast, and four or five frozen strawberries blended into two generous glasses of orange juice, I had one piece of bacon, one piece of toast, two strawberries, and one glass of juice?

To my mind, two slices of bacon shriveled down to three bites apiece and two slices of toast don’t exactly add up to overeating, but maybe it is. I do get up with a bowling ball in my belly, and on that ration I don’t start to feel hungry again until one or two in the afternoon…a long haul from 6:00 a.m.

What if instead of my usual two cans of beloved foamy-delicious beer or two cocktails or two glasses of wine, what if the daily booze ration were cut to one serving? Then I wouldn’t feel deprived (how can anyone live without a drinky-poo with dinner???), but I’d still be consuming half as many booze calories.

Oh, the ingenuity!

So, a few days ago I started with this experiment. Have I lost weight? No…but it’s only been four days. Haven’t gained any more, which I take as a good sign.

Interestingly, the reduced breakfast still left me with a lead weight in my belly. The reduced lunch/midafternoon snack created less of that effect, but I still felt stuffed after eating. Dinner…oh, it’s hard to avoid running amok at dinner. How I love dinnertime!

The beer has lasted a long, long while, though: when I thought I was all out and felt too tired to schlep to the grocery store for a new fix, lo! One more can lurked in the refrigerator door. 🙂

It appears that I’m either overestimating what “half-off” the normal rations means, or “normal” has been maybe three times too much food instead of only twice too much. Last night I grilled some scallops on the gorgeous new gas barbecue. Usually I would cook four to six. Figured I should have three, since one was pretty small.

3 grilled sea scallops
about a palmful of frozen peas, defrosted, cupped in…
two leaves of butter lettuce
two small tomatoes, cut up
garlic roquefort vinaigrette
1 glass of ice water

Result: stuffed! Absolutely gorged. Could barely haul the bowling ball away from the table. Clearly, I could have done just fine with two scallops and one tomato.

This is weird. Not only is cutting the rations not leaving me hungry, I’m still feeling overfull after what seems like a small meal. However, I am getting hungry faster…after the reduced breakfast, I’m ready for lunch at noon.

So this morning I tried cutting back even further:

2 pieces of butter lettuce
a spoonful of a bean salad marketed as “Texas caviar”—very tasty, BTW
2 frozen strawberries
1 glass orange juice
decaf coffee

Thought I: this is gonna leave me lightheaded with hunger!

But nay. After the tiny breakfast, I feel comfortably full. Not sick with overeating, but like I had a decent meal without eating myself stupid.

Now we know how this is going to work: the Half-Off Diet means really, truly half of what one has been in the habit of eating and drinking. Not half plus…oh, I don’t think two scallops will make it, but half. Half half HALF!

Let’s watch this process and see if it works.

Meanwhile, what about the dog?

Well, first she’s gotta quit getting doggie treats while I’m eating. She’s been extorting a bribe to leave the human alone while it’s trying to sit quietly. That “insurance” policy is hereby canceled.

Reducing the amount a small dog eats, especially when you’re preparing food and not dishing up fake food from a bag, strikes me as problematic. We know she’s been getting too many calories from the doggie treats, and we know that in this heat she hasn’t been getting enough exercise—by 9 a.m. the sidewalks are hot enough to burn her feet, and they stay that way until well after dark.

So I think she needs to get a little less starch, maybe fewer veggies (which she probably doesn’t digest efficiently anyway), and more low-fat meat.

That roasted chicken we’ve been getting from Costco? Cassie and I love it and usually share one a week. There’s a reason it’s so succulent and delicious, despite being no more “real” chicken than the stuff you buy off the counter. They’re certainly injecting it with something, and dollars to donuts the “something” is rich in salt and fat. For the foreseeable future, we’ll grill our own chicken, thank you.

And beef will have to be a lot less fatty than ground chuck. After this, if I can’t get bargain meat that’s tough as an old boot because it has little fat in it, we’ll pass on the beef. Maybe I can get SDXB to shoot us some venison…just have to be careful he doesn’t know who’s gonna be eating it. He does kill a lot of rabbit out there in Sun City…I’ll bet I can persuade him to give me a few for, uhm, hassenpfeffer. Right.

This will be a challenge, because he doesn’t kill the jackrabbits—he doesn’t think they’re good to eat, and he thinks the cottontails are more destructive. But he will take out those voracious cottontails. Mm hmm.

Dog diet, then:

No more doggie treats
Less starchy stuff, especially bread
Faithful ingestion of the daily vitamin
Lower-fat meats of all kinds
More exercise, lots more exercise

Ditto the human.

Anyone want to make this a challenge? Tell me your goal, try the Half-Off Diet, report your weekly weight loss to funnyaboutmoney {att} mac {dott} com, and every Saturday or Sunday I’ll post our results.

Some Half-Off Recipes would be good, too…share your minimalist meal plans along with your progress!

The term Half-Off Diet™ and the strategy entailed in it are trademarked and copyrighted. All rights reserved.