A couple months ago I realized that my gut was trying to tell me something.

This is not anything new. My gut has been telling me things for decades. Most importantly it tells me when my trousers are getting too tight.

That’s what it was telling me this time. 

I was getting cramping pains in my gut and I knew if I didn’t do something about it, and quickly, I’d be sorry.

In the past when this happened, I would order new pairs of trousers with a larger waist size, but this time I felt I had reached my limit.

I mean, where would it end? My waist size was already mumblety inches larger than it was when I graduated from high school. Hmm. Maybe I should use the metric system and put that into centimeters? Nope. It sounds even worse in centimeters than it does in inches.

I can’t keep buying all new trousers every year or so simply because my waist keeps expanding, can I?

So I decided to get really serious about losing some weight. Around my waist.

The trouble is that as far as I know, one cannot simply direct the body to lose weight at a particular location. One must try to lose weight and hope that the body removes it from the area(s) that one is targeting. Or so I’ve been told.

In any case, I got serious about my diet. In my case I mostly cut out starches. Which meant practically no bread products, no pasta, no rice, and worst of all, no potatoes. I also cut back just a bit on my main courses at meal time, meaning I did not clean my plate. I exclusively used Stevia as a sweetener on breakfast cereal (rather than sometimes switching to maple syrup or brown sugar), and I made sure I got enough protein by using a protein supplement. Vitamins and minerals were covered by a both a daily pill and a salad.

By doing the above I felt I could still enjoy the desserts that I’ve been baking, just smaller portions.

Of course, I continued to get a certain amount of exercise every day. Walking is my primary exercise, but I also try to do ten minute Apple workouts a few times a week. Ten minutes is all I can stand, as they are so boring, but nevertheless… 

The good news is that it worked! I’ve been losing about a pound a week. The even better news is that it seems to be coming off the waistline. I say “seems” because actually measuring my waistline has proven to be too disheartening. I don’t mind checking my weight, even though I’m over 40 pounds heavier than when I graduated from high school, but there’s something about that mumblety inch waistline that I find depressing.

But as I was saying, within about two weeks after starting the diet, I was able to close the waist button on my trousers without getting any cramping pains. I’ve now lost several more pounds and the trousers almost feel spacious around my waist. It’s possible I might be able to switch to an older set of trousers with a inch smaller waist size. I’ve been saving them for just such a possibility.

But I don’t want to get ahead of my self. 

Meanwhile, does this mean that I can never again eat starchy foods?

Well, I suppose I can always go off the diet for one day here or there without causing any problems, but I don’t want to speculate.