Diet

I recently got engaged. After the celebratory Champagne and indulgent restaurant meals my fiancé and I enjoyed in our month of post-betrothal bliss, reality set in: soon I must fit into a wedding dress. Of course, dresses come in all shapes and sizes, just like brides. But have you seen the price of a wedding photographer lately? I’d like to look my best. These days, the main weight-loss food trend seems to be the ketogenic diet. Like the Paleo and Atkins diets, eating keto means cutting carbs. Unlike these other diets, keto isn’t high in protein; it’s high in fat. The idea is that depriving yourself of carbs and protein will cause your body to burn fat for energy — starting with the bacon and eggs you ate for breakfast and ending with your thighs.

About five years ago, just after my 50th birthday, I noticed that I was extremely fat. Not ‘overweight’, not ‘heavy’, not ‘big-boned’, not possessed of a ‘good sense of humor’; fat is what it was. It was down to a long-undiagnosed medical condition and the attendant medication. It was also down to enjoying food a lot. What to do about it? Like a lot of men, I like a solution. I fundamentally believe that if you have a problem, you just need to find the right expert, who will lift the hood, run a few tests, give you a schedule to follow and it’ll be right as rain. ‘Go to the Mayr,’ a friend said. ‘They’ll put you right.’ And so it was. The Mayr Clinic is a celebrated health farm on the shores of the Wörthersee, a lake in eastern Austria.