Last night I was remembering those Low Fat/High Exercise Days. When my first husband and I ran our own business from home, I got an exercise bike and that's how I started my day.

I would tape whole movies or two hour long TV shows (remember VHS ) and I would do 45 minutes of damn-cardio and 45 minutes of floor exercises like crunches, planking, Pilates, and Egoscue (which was the only one I liked) to cool down and finish the tape. Then a shower and I was ready to work.

I didn't want to spend the money, time, effort, parking, and watching commercials on random channels at the gym. Tapes meant I could fast forward through all those commercials, because it was so BORING to do this.

According to the book I followed at the time, The T-Factor Diet, all I had to do was keep under 25 grams of fat a day. And I did. Whole wheat toast with jam and NO butter for breakfast. Big bowl of pasta with tomato sauce with NO cheese for lunch. Dinner was a salad full of vegetables with a no-fat dressing full of sugar and a dry chicken breast.

Lo, the white cheddar rice cakes I grazed on. Once a week we, short on money, splurged at Wendy's and I ATE FAT in one of those value meals. (It wasn't good fat, I'm sure Still, it might have been good for me in avoiding long stretches of low low fat.) The rest of the time, I was strict.

Did it work? At first, it seemed to. My tummy was flatter, likely from the Pilates. I was carrying an extra 25-30, and I lost 10-15, enough for people to notice and my clothes to fit better. But then I had a high blood pressure problem from a kinked artery, and in order to wean off the medicine after a procedure fixed it (now that's modern medicine that WORKED) I had to REST. And eating that way made me go up at least an extra forty.

And trying to revive that a few years later drove me up 100 pounds, which I have since lost. On low carb!