I went to Kaiser in July for my annual physical. My doctor says I have high blood pressure. I forget what the numbers were exactly, but it's not real severe. He put me on some pills, but told me "if you can loose 20 pounds I can almost guarantee that you won't need to take these pills".

So I thought about that for a few weeks, and then I decided to try to loose some weight. Since I quit smoking about five years ago I bet I have gained about thirty pounds. I knew when I quit smoking I would probably gain some weight.

My cousin and his wife went on the Atkins diet last year and they both did pretty well and are now in maintenance mode. My sister called me the other day and told me about "The South Beach Diet" and it sounded really great to me. I think I have heard the doctor who invented the diet speaking on the radio once. I bought the book last week and have been on the diet now for one week.

The diet is divided into phases - in phase 1 you cut out all carbs, sugar and fruits from your diet. You stay with that for two weeks to rid your body of the cravings for bad carbs and sugars, etc. Then you go into phase 2 and stay with that until you meet your weight goal. Phase 2 is a more liberal version of phase 1. After you meet your weight goal you go into phase 3 which I haven't even read about yet. I have lost a little more than ten pounds on the diet so far. Actually I went from 285 lbs down to 271.

I flew up to seattle at the end of june to see my sister and her husband. My uncle and aunt were having their 60th wedding anniversary. Unfortunately my uncle had some problems with his heart and had to go in for a "tune up". He had a quintuple bypass a few years ago and sometimes needs to have a valve job.