After 4 months of low-carb dieting, here is what I have been reduced to: this morning, I ate chocolate pudding for breakfast.

No sugar, no calorie pudding, but pudding nonetheless.

When I started the diet, I was almost looking forward to it: eggs and bacon every morning! Woohoo! I love eggs!

I no longer love eggs. I loathe eggs. I have 3 18-egg cartons in my refrigerator that I bought 6 weeks ago and haven’t had the nerve to throw out yet, even though the yolks inside must, by now, have all the consistency of whale oil.

I still have nothing but love for bacon, but bacon is a hassle. You can fry and egg in about 2 minutes, but bacon, at its fastest, is going to be an 9-10 minute job (if you don’t mind it spongey and teaming with trichinosis critters), and the cleanup is another 5 minutes while you scrape burnt pig chunks out of the pan. For a while I was making it in a huge batch once a week, but that’s a hassle too; either you bake it on cookie sheets, which works pretty well, but leaves you with 2 massive bacon-encrusted metal sheets (adding a fun flavor to all your Christmas cookies), or you fry it, which takes 45 minutes because a pan can only hold so much bacon and you don’t dare leave it for fear that it will burn.

So this morning, I walked downstairs, opened the refrigerator, spotted the oozing bowl of chocolate pudding that I mixed up on Tuesday, and said “heck yes this is breakfast of some ilk” and watched a Daily Show while ladling chocolate dessert into my mouth like a 4-year-old fatty watching cartoons on a Saturday morning. All I needed was jowls.

On the other hand, I look pretty. So there’s that.