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One interesting side effect of my current diet is that it’s gotten me cooking more frequently. I’ve always enjoyed cooking, but it’s hard to find the time, particularly if one works all day. If you want to cook anything complicated, it can take an hour or more of preparation; if you don’t get home until 6, suddenly you’re not eating until 7:30, which is unacceptable when small children are involved. It’s no wonder busy families tend to eat fast food, or ready-made meals in boxes from Stouffer’s.

When dieting, though, the easiest way to fill up without taking in a lot of calories is to eat vegetables. Salads are highly recommended, but boring; after a while I long for something with a little more flavor. Cooked vegetables are the next best thing, but the “vegetarian” ready-made meals you find are horrifible. The solution? Slice up your own veggies and throw ’em in a hot pan. A cabinet full of tasty spices also makes a big difference; curry powder, for example, makes anything, even plain cauliflower, into Special South Asian Cuisine. Yum.

It also helps having Sarah home with the kids for the summer, because it means she can get a head start on dinner. She’s awfully good about timing it such that I can come home, quickly slice some veggies and fry ’em up, and she’s already got a low-calorie meat like pork or chicken a-roasting. (Last night was pork tenderloin, and it was better than sex.) It seems to be working so far; in the first 9 days of my diet, I went from 271 pounds to 261. To be sure, a lot of that is the heralded “water weight,” but hey, I’ll take it.

Now I just need to start going to the gym. I’ll, uh, get right on that.