What Arthur Agatston, M.D. Doesn't Know Won't Hurt Him

I just ate a homemade chocolate-chip-and-walnut cookie, and it was amazing. Soft, and chewy, with just the right size morsels of chocolate - not too tiny, but not those mammoth boulders you sometimes get either. I think there was a little cinnamon involved. I am a happy man.

About a week ago I started trying to follow the South Beach diet. I switched my coffee to decaf, my cereal to bacon and eggs, my sandwiches to kielbasa and my chicken-and-rice dinners to salmon and veggies. It's been rough.

I do feel better, though, most of the time, and it actually gives me a slight boost now to walk past the office candy dish. Penelope's doing the diet too - and following it much more diligently than I am - so that makes meal procurement a lot easier. She cooks seemingly all the time. Our vegetable steamer will soon be worn down to a nub, if that's possible.

I like to think I'm turning the corner, now, entering the zone where I'll think about food less than I did before, since I'm not constantly walking around hungry. Hopping off the glycemic rollercoaster, as it were.

Over the past couple of months, my office offered constant availability of candy bars, potato chips, fruit snacks in those little pouches and sugar-packed soft drinks, and I partook wholeheartedly. "Man, I want some CANDY!" I'd think to myself, and go grab myself a mini-Milky Way Midnight bar. Then, about twenty minutes later, I'd feel drained and feverish and desperately in need of some more candy. So I'd get some.

This could go on all day, as you'd imagine, and I'd go home a pasty, run-down mess. Lope would ask what I felt like doing, and I'd plunk down on the couch with a beer and say, "You're looking at it."

I just couldn't figure out why I was sick all the time. I always felt like I was fighting off a cold, or something... "Is something going around?" I'd wonder aloud.

And, sure enough, I can feel myself starting to pay for that cookie. The energy it gave me is burning out, and my head's slumping ever so slightly closer to the keyboard.

All the more reason to stick to the diet, I guess. I don't know if it's just age, or overloading on sugar during the holidays, or what, but either my body started demanding that I acknowledge what I put into it or my brain just got smart enough to listen. I guess this is part of the responsibility of adulthood - ultimately you're accountable, even to your own bloodstream.

I can comply. And I know I should - it wasn't right of me to poison my body all these years, indulging non-stop in the see-food diet. I'm ready to be healthier, to feel better, to take better care of myself.

I'll watch what I eat, and what I drink, and maybe even exercise once in a while, instead of plonking down on the couch with a beer. I know my dog Vince will appreciate that.

Lope's doing it, so that'll help, and besides... if she's doing it, I have to. It's the only way to be sure we synchronize our deaths - can't have one going before the other.

This is fine. This is good. This will work.

As long as I still get an occasional cookie.