Never once in all my years have I ever considered going on a diet.

In youth I was a skinny kid who thought eating a roaring bore. I’d fidget and grumble at the table until my parents finally gave up and released me once again into the great outdoors where all the fun stuff was going on.

At last my palate—along with everything else—matured, and I began to see that fine dining could offer as much adventure as a game of hide-and-seek. Plus, I discovered that with the food, you get to drink wine.

Now, after about half a century spent puffing round the courses on the culinary playground, it seems my poor old body is plum wore out. Recently I was advised by my family doctor that weight loss is now the game, and I’m expected to be a good sport about it.

I never take on a new project without doing the research. If the order was to change my eating and drinking habits, then I intended to become as thoroughly saturated in the dark practices of dieting as a diffused tea bag.

This statistic I found interesting: According to a 2012 report issued by the Senate Sub-Committee on Consolidated Reflection, 72 percent of Americans do not own a full-length mirror. And, said a footnote, a startling 89 percent of us do not have a scale cozied up next to the toilet in the bathroom.

How can you change what you look like if you don’t know what you look like?

I figured—besides the mirror and the scale—I needed a coach. When dieting is the game, a nutritionist has the playbook. So I made an appointment and went in for a pep talk.

The dietician did have a scale in her office, a high-tech one that knew how to separate the fat from the muscle. On the muscle side, the scale reported that I was a candidate for having sand kicked in my face. Proportionately, the fat count outweighed any chance that I might be mistaken for Madonna.

Where does a woman not want to be fat most?

And the answer is: her belly and her waist. Once a gal starts buying slacks that have elastic waistbands, she’s cooked. So there I sat in my stretch jeans, trying not to fidget and grumble, trying to listen hard to the game plan for losing weight.

Told I must limit my caloric intake to 1,400 calories a day, I had to ask—as I’m sure anyone who has never cared a whit about what goes in her mouth would ask—“What’s a calorie?”

The nutritionist thought I was being rhetorical. “Exactly,” she replied enthusiastically. “And now you have 1,400 of them to give serious attention to.”

She then brought out a most unappetizing array of molded plastic items that tried, and tried in vain, to look like food. The purpose of this display was to show me graphically the portions of food I would be allowed to have on my plate at each meal.

I eyed the plastic square of ersatz meat. The thing wouldn’t fill up the palm of my hand. As a single daily ration, the mock cheese square was even worse. Any self-respecting mouse would turn his nose up at the meager bit. Not worth the threat of the trap, the mouse would say.

The new diet would be paired with physical exercise, she told me. “You must get up from the computer chair and use your muscles. Find something fun for your body to do and then give it your all.”

“Does sex count?” I asked.

She paused to scan data about my personal life noted on the questionnaire I’d filled out prior to our meeting. Then, with the slightest suggestion of a smirk, she said the exercise regimen should be undertaken daily, not once every other month and on religious holidays.

I confessed that I do like to dance. At the top of a piece of blue paper the dietician wrote: Dance around the house 5 times a week for 15 minutes each session.

The time had come to discuss booze. I knew this even if she did not.

“Uh,” said I, “what about cocktails? What about wine? What about a nice after-dinner pousse café? To aid digestion—a digestif as it were?”

It turned out this was a Zero Tolerance nutritionist, because I was told that in a serious war against fat, imbibing was the greatest offense and the imbiber was a miscreant guilty of not only undesirable conduct but a heinous breach of the allotted calorie count.

“What am I supposed to drink then?” I asked, completely, utterly in the dark.

Apparently to rid a woman of the excess flab around areas she does not want to be fat in most, she must drink water. Lots of water. Enough water to float a battleship.

What it comes down to is this… After two months of dieting, I’m in the same position I was at age 10. Skin and bones, dancing around the house at all hours, fidgeting at the dinner table, grumbling about what’s on the plate and what’s in the glass.

The calorie count remains down, but with so much renewed energy, the count’s been upped on that other thing.