Wine Is Beautiful!

A  great history for a great diet that "worked for me." 

All diets are difficult 

Picking up from other chapters on the site or chapters in the book, I confess that the only diet that has ever worked long term for me is the one that I am enjoying right now. I am proudly on the Red Wine Diet, which just over a year ago had no name at all. As I put forth elsewhere in this work, for months, I did not even know that the diet was working. 

In other words, I did not even know I was dieting. Some tuned in to today's jargon after hearing that sentence would say, "SWEET!" Yes indeed, how sweet it is. I did not even know that I was on a diet and yet I lost weight. 

I used no tape measures. I wore no tights. I had no gym membership. I was in no gym, and there was no continual checking for weight loss. It actually just happened whether you believe it or not.

 

So, how did it happen?

Let me just say that about twenty years ago, I developed a proclivity for "Dago Red" wine. Type in "dago red" in your browser or better yet from the WineDiets.Com web site and you will know what this is. You may also skip to Chapter 11 right now to find an enjoyable piece about this special vintage. 

My wonderful neighbor gave me a gallon of Dago Red simply because he liked me. And so for a number of years now, long before my getting my own gallon jugs independently, I have been enjoying what I call DGR. It is available for several months each year from Thanksgiving through the end of February. In the last few years, I have had better sources and I get it earlier and I can typically save enough to have it available through April. So, for most of the year there is no DGR. 

I have had some years in which I received as many as 50 gallons and sometimes more throughout the season. When gifted, one must also gift and so I do give much if not most of it away as it is a prized gift in Pennsylvania. By the end of each January, I begin to look to the vintners to supply me more and more and more but it is often not available. 

Whenever I make a visit to Paul and Cathy's or to Rachel and Mike's, or Ann Marie and Ross's or Madelyn and George's or Claire and Chip's, or Ed and Evelyn's at Christmas time, I come bearing a gift of Dago Red to be shared with all the guests. I admit in these circumstances, while visiting, I have my full share of the gift. 

So, every year, but mostly the last several, after January, the gift has been on me with pleasure. And because we have our own share of visitors at our home during the Thanksgiving and Christmas seasons, most of whom really like the "brew," without the help of some great vintners, it would be easy to run out. 

Dago Red has no preservatives. It is a chemical free wine. Consequently, it has a penchant if not kept cool, to spoil and begin to get a hint of a vinegar taste some time before May. When all the guests do not show up during the DGR season, somehow, the gallon jugs still disappear. I admit that I am almost solely responsible for that…nobody else. 

What about the diet connection? 

Sometime after the Dago Red wine season in 2013, things seemed different for me. I was bigger than ever or so I felt. That nasty new bathroom scale was almost 100% accurate and it had a bad habit of always noting the worst. I was 343 pounds and who knows if I had not been a few pounds more before I first checked the numbers that year. 

I do not recall consciously choosing a path to lose weight but I do recall thinking that I could not afford to gain any more weight. So, from my perspective I needed to engage in some defensive dieting. 

I do a lot of writing. Believe it or not, I actually wrote my most recent words right here just a few seconds ago. Sometimes when I write I am working on books--www.letsgopublish.com, and www.bookhawkers.com, and conservativebookshop.com. 

Other times I write contribution pieces free for the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader as a mailbox drop-in or I am published by Times Leader or others for works somewhat more extensive. Several years ago, for over a year, for example, I was a regular columnist for Conservative Action Alerts, a web publication. You may see many of my articles at www.briwnwkelly.com. 

So, while I am writing at my desk with Buddy the Cat and Benny the Dog on duty fearlessly protecting me from intruders, I sometimes have coffee as I am enjoying right now. Other times, I drink some fruit juice or water. Still other times, I drink red wine, especially after 6:00 PM. 

In the morning, I like coffee and some OJ or TJ, but not too much. The old me might even have eaten a bunch of sweets such as muffins, donuts or crumb cake, if readily accessible when the juice was gone and the coffee was prepared for the accompaniment. But, then again, those days were the days in which my corpulence was on the rise, and I had begun to think that I was invincible.

That was the old me.

It may have been early to mid-summer 2013. For sure it was some time after my high-water mark weight of 343.pounds. The old me subtly had changed. Even I did not recognize it. But it had changed, nonetheless. 

Without thinking about losing weight, I had come to believe, after so many false diet starts and premature finishes that I could no longer get my body to lose anything. I therefore definitely knew that I was not throwing as many shovels of body fat into the carbohydrate redistributor. 

I was sincerely worried that my behavior would cause my normally light metabolism burn to possibly transform me into 400 pound oblivion. So, I simply changed my behavior but not that much. I was not expecting a big payoff from my body. I just did not want to gain any more weight. So I took action that was a bit different from my old actions. 

Without knowing it, I had implemented what I will now call the:

 

Wine Diet.

 

It worked for me. I lost weight and as a side benefit, it continues to push my cholesterol downward. The diet is included as a menu item on the WineDiets.Com web site and it exists in four different forms—Red, Rose', White, and Grape Juice. Read about them all on both the web site and the book.

 

What made the wine diet different from my normal behavior?

 

It is difficult to believe but the truth is that I did not know that I was on a diet when I went for my fall 2013 semi-annual Doctor Kerrigan appointment and weigh-in. I had lost weight unexpectedly—nine pounds. It was a real nine pound loss… real pounds. And, though I had changed how I was eating, I did not consider it a "diet" as I was not starving.  

I reflected that maybe I had tricked the nurse into letting me weigh in without my coat and wallet and shoes. But, I had not. It was real, and it was the first weight loss for me in some time. 

Even after I went through the festive Thanksgiving, Christmas and Dago Red seasons in 2013 / 2014, at the spring 2014 doctor's appointment there was another nice weight loss. When I weighed in at the next meeting with the doctor's scale, the nurse would not let me take any of the heavy winter stuff off and yet, I was down another six pounds. 

My pants were beginning to get loose and I had to add a few belt holes into my standard belt. I added more than I needed with hope they would be needed soon. I knew I had lost weight but this was official proof. 

Finally, as I was asking myself why I was losing weight when I was only trying to avoid hitting 400 pounds, I figured it out. I tuned into exactly why I was losing the weight. I was not losing 4 or 5 pounds a week or even a month but when I did count in months, I found that I had been losing at least a pound each month without knowing it. I had a hard time actually believing what I was seeing. The doctor's scale began to see the same thing. Because I can remove more clothing for an accurate weigh-in, I used my own accurate scale, not the doctor's to calculate the weight that is chronicled on the web site and in the book. 

I am very pleased that over the course of almost a year, I lost 15 pounds and though not completely effortless, I was definitely losing weight. Losing weight is fun when you are not starving all the time. By December 2015, I had gone from 343 to 281.6. Most of it was from the major losses in the fall, 2015. I lost a total of sixty two pounds. I probably should be on a TV show. I wish I had taken pictures along the way. I'll have to go find some. 

For me the wine diet worked and it is still working Check out the specific wine diets yourself and join me at the weight loss club. The best! .....to you all.

The best...  

My new slogan is "It worked for me!"