Today I lost another half-pound, putting total tonnage lost at four pounds. That’s very fast weight loss for me. Very.

I feel good about it, but I wonder if I can maintain the no-carbohydrate diet. Although I’ve been following my very own I Don’t Go to the Beach diet, in which the first two weeks are modeled after the South Beach plan, I could really really go for a peach right now.

The lack of fruit has been hardest. While I’ve been eating scads of vegetables, I love fruit and regret not having it at the peak of the season. But the rewards of losing weight are worth it, I suppose. In any case, I’ll go ahead and add it back in next week and see what happens.

The thing I’ve noticed over the last week and a half of not eating carbohydrates is that my moods seem more stable. At first, particularly after a meal, I was really pining for something sweet. Now, not quite so much. While intellectually and emotionally I still crave something sweet, my body doesn’t seem to need it quite as much. So that’s good.

What’s unclear to me is how I’m going to manage this over the long term. Because I’m really trying to change my lifestyle (including writing this blog every morning), it seems almost impossible to imagine that I could go through the rest of my life avoiding all the things I love (wine, fruit, carbohydrates … the list goes on). Then again, I’d rather not be fat. So maybe if I think about it that way, it could be possible to have a treat now and then and be good most of the time.