No pasta, no bread, no sugar. A low-carb life rededicated.

I've resisted NY resolutions, but they keep coming at me. All online and print venues scream with January weight-loss plans and exercise programs. Have I ever resolved to lose weight and exercise? Of course! Only for about 40 years. Maybe more. I'm always nibbling away at poundage and at the pledge to get strong, flexible, and balanced. This year I thought, I'm not going there. I already know how to eat, how to keep fit.

Typical low-carb dinner: Soup with onions, garlic, kale, a few  beans, chicken and chicken broth, roasted green chilies, chipotle peppers, topped with avocado and a dollop of sour cream. Low-carb doesn't mean low-fat. The quesadilla on the side is a bit of a splurge as most small corn tortillas have 12-15 carbs.

But somehow, after an especially tempting and delectable holiday baking season, I have rededicated to a low-carb regime that began a decade ago, and that has kept me at a reasonable weight and good health without too much suffering or deprivation.

Unless, of course, I count the suffering and deprivation during my near-death experience in October 2002 and the subsequent circumstances that set me on this dietary lifestyle. As I wrote in 2005:

In October 2002, I accidentally lost 15 pounds. It was easy, and I didn’t have to do a thing except nearly die. This is not a weight-loss method I recommend, but it ultimately changed my life and the way I look at food. So I guess that like a lot of bad things that happen to good people, my illness can be viewed as a blessing and perhaps the world’s strangest route to low-carbohydrate nutrition. 

 I had just returned from three weeks in Nepal, a spectacular but terrifying third world country with its feet in putrid refuse and its eyes on the shining mountaintops. I carried back with me an evil hitchhiker, a virulent bacteria that multiplied exponentially and dumped toxins into my blood by the bucket load. 

After a few days of beating back a 104 fever with OTC remedies,  I ended up in the ER, weak and miserable beyond description. After misdiagnosis (and treatment) for malaria ensued, an ER doctor declared in a voice that I later realized was a bit peppy for the occasion, You're septic!

I had no idea what septic meant, which was good, although I was too sick to be scared. I was admitted to the hospital and lost consciousness almost immediately. 

The first, and, fortunately, the only, organ to fail was my kidneys. My loved ones offer sobering accounts of watching me puff up like a blowfish. My primary care doctor then, Dan Moline, M.D., pulled in infectious disease specialists and knocked himself out to find an antibiotic that would work, but nothing did. Fluids continued to seep out of capillaries and into tissues contributing to the blowfish effect. 

Dr. Moline prepared my family for the worst, but he refused to give up on me. He later told me that he stayed with me until 2:30 a.m. on the night he expected I would die, and then remembered a simple now out-of- favor treatment for kidney disease or failure: albumin infusion. The next morning he expected to see an empty bed, but there I was, sitting up in bed staring at my hideous arms, which looked like clown balloons and were too heavy to lift.

My kidneys had kicked back in, my capillaries were beginning to behave, and the fluids that had been pumped into my tissues for days began to drain. I had gained 70 pounds of fluid in less than a week.

Relocated from the ICU to a regular hospital room, I used my strange heavy arms to lift food to my mouth for the first time in a week. Hospital food! Bleah! Right off the bat, I was offered Ensure, a thick, sweet, nauseating concoction that coats the tongue like milk of magnesia. The first two Ensure ingredients are water and sugar. One cup of Ensure has 50 grams — approximately 12.5 teaspoons of sugar. I wasn’t paying attention to sugar grams back then, but knew that Ensure and some of the other “meals” that appeared on my bed tray were not doing me any good. (This later led to an early ah ha! moment: Most hospital dietitians and too many doctors are stuck in the dark ages about alternative approaches to nutrition.) 

Note: As I update this post in May 2016, I concede that Ensure has benefits. It helped keep my mother alive until her demise at 98, and a friend's mom, approaching 103, is on an Ensure diet.

With the catheter out, my main exercise was shuffling back and forth to the latrine as the stored fluids made their way through my restored  kidneys. Back home, I remained a frequent flyer to the bathroom. Each morning for a couple weeks I was rewarded at the scale with a one-to-three-pound overnight weight loss. Fun! 

I'd wanted to lose 15 or 20 pounds for years, but not badly enough to suffer deprivation.  I’d had it with yo-yo dieting, always regaining the five to 20 pounds I managed to lose. 

I'd shoved aside the fact that I weighed almost as much as I had when I was nine months pregnant with my first child (170 pounds), and told myself that wearing big tops over elastic- waist pants wasn’t such a bad fashion statement for a woman in her fifties. My body mass index, which, I knew nothing about at the time, was 26.5, putting me solidly into the overweight category. Nobody, especially me, was describing me as obese, but more like “she could stand to lose a few pounds.” Boy, was I in denial.

When the weight loss (and multiple nocturnal bathroom visits) finally stopped, I settled at 155 pounds, down 15  from my pre-Nepal weight. Yahoo! I thought. Now if I can just manage to keep it off.

Keeping weight under control wasn't quite as easy as I thought. After my medical crisis passed, I was back to preparing family meals as usual: lots of veggies, brown rice, baked potatoes, salads, and low-fat meats. Bacon was banned, and so was butter. But not Junior Mints, which were fat free. What could possibly go wrong?

Plenty. Just ask all the people who gained weight and kept it on during decades of the low-fat nutrition craze, which still holds sway. Me? I'm a low-carb believer now, and have been known to proselytize.

All I need to do during the resolution time of year is to talk to myself about making a correction here and there.: Cut the bread, sugar, pasta, processed foods, cakes, cookies, and no sodas, ever.

So far, so good.

The low-carb burger. No bun, baby. Use a fork and a napkin.