Sally Breslin: My Life: TIME'S RUNNING OUT TO DIET FOR MY CLASS REUNION

In only two months, I will be attending my 50-year high-school reunion…and I’m trying to figure out how to drop about 25 lbs. and 500 wrinkles by then. The problem is, if I lose some weight, I’ll end up with even more wrinkles because my skin doesn’t snap back the way it used to when I was young. Now it just hangs there, like a deflated balloon.

I have never had much success with dieting, mainly because I love sweets, especially anything chocolate. Even as I am writing this, there is a bag of Hershey’s dark-chocolate kisses sitting next to me. I have convinced myself that dark chocolate is healthy, so eating a half-pound of kisses in one night is actually good for me.

There is only one diet I’ve ever really had success with, and that was over 35 years ago. It was a no-carb diet, which basically eliminated every white food ever created (potatoes, bread, sugar, flour, rice, etc.), but allowed unlimited amounts of non-carbohydrate foods.

I remember rushing out to buy the best-selling book that first introduced the new non-carb dieting craze back then. Basically, according to the author, the diet was based on the concept that if Eskimos could survive on nothing but whale blubber and no fresh fruits or vegetables and live to be 85 or older, then non-Eskimos also should be able to. And, using a lot of fancy medical terms that most laymen couldn’t understand (yours truly included), the book explained that when the body is deprived of carbohydrates such as sugar, flour, grains and potatoes, it is forced to eat its own fat.

Well, anything that could eat up my fat sounded ideal to me.

I read the book from cover to cover and decided the diet was a dream come true. Essentially, I could eat 10 pounds of zero-carb foods for dinner, if my stomach could hold that much, and still rapidly lose weight. Calories suddenly didn’t matter, either. According to the book, I could eat 10,000 calories per day, as long as what I ate contained no carbohydrates.

The list of zero-carbohydrate foods sounded pretty exciting…at first. It included just about every form of meat and poultry imaginable, plus eggs, butter, heavy cream, mayonnaise, cheese and most seafood, including butter-soaked lobster. A small amount of lettuce, which could be drenched in Roquefort dressing, also was allowed, to break up the monotony of all of the meat.

I eagerly started the diet on a Monday morning. My daily menu consisted of a cheese omelet with ham and bacon for breakfast; a grilled chicken breast or pork chops for lunch; and a big, thick steak and a small lettuce salad for dinner. For snacks, I munched on fried pork rinds, hard-boiled eggs, chicken legs or a handful of macadamia nuts, the only nuts allowed.

The first week, I lost 10 pounds. The second week, I lost eight. By the third week, I was ready to sneak into someone’s garden, dig up a potato and eat it raw. I also was dying for a slice of bread, even one that was fuzzy with mold.

The diet book recommended putting a slab of meat between two slices of cheese to simulate a sandwich, but that illusion didn’t work for me. I wanted bread. I wanted to smell and taste yeast.

The book did contain a recipe for “faux” bread for the truly desperate. It was made by whipping up a meringue from egg whites, then swirling the meringue into shapes that resembled rolls, and baking them until they were of a sponge-like consistency. The rolls (and I use the term loosely) then supposedly could be used just like bread. I tried the recipe and eagerly bit into one of the rolls. It was like eating air…only with less flavor.

I also began to crave desserts. So every night, I’d whip up a big bowl of heavy cream and flavor it with artificial sweetener and vanilla extract. There was nothing I could pile the whipped cream on top of, however, other than a slab of meat, so I’d grab a spoon and sit down and eat the entire bowl of whipped cream. I actually could hear my arteries clogging.

Still, I continued to lose weight. My success should have made me happy and encouraged me to keep going, but by then, I was too obsessed with my craving for carbohydrates to care. I needed carbs. I had dreams about carbs. Every bone in my body was begging me for carbs.

Not surprisingly, I finally allowed temptation to get the better of me, and I went on a carbohydrate binge that lasted for three days. I ate mashed potatoes topped with crumbled potato chips. I dumped chocolate pudding on top of chocolate ice cream and sprinkled it with chocolate chips. I ate half a loaf of bread slathered with peanut butter and marshmallow fluff.

And I ended up with such stomach cramps, I nearly had to call a priest to administer my last rites.

But worst of all, in less than a week, I gained back all of the weight I’d lost, and then some.

Even so, I am just desperate enough at the moment to try the diet again, mainly because I need something that works quickly, and I know from experience the no-carb diet is a very rapid pound-shedder. Also, unlike other diets, it won’t leave me feeling so hungry, I’ll be desperately eyeing my dogs’ bowl of kibble.

So if you will excuse me, I’m off now to go buy a side of beef.

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