I have been able to drop about 15 pounds since arriving back in our village a month and a half ago. Having spent a fair bit of time on the “husky” side of the scale lately, it’s been nice to finally see a bit of movement in this other, less blubbery, direction.

I still have about 30 pounds that I’d like to get rid of, but I thought I would go ahead and share a few pages from my personal playbook, just in case someone else wanted to utilize my methods.

Based on my experience here in the tropics, these three factors have been the key to my success:

• Dehydrate yourself daily. No matter how much you drink, be sure to sweat out at least 8 ounces more liquid than you took in. If you don’t have rivers of perspiration flowing down your face and arms, even while performing trivial activities of mild exertion, you are probably doing something wrong. Ideally, at the end of each day, your kidneys will resemble shriveled prunes, and your urine will look like orange juice concentrate.

• Replace 50% of your diet with hardtack and peanut butter. Oatmeal would also be an acceptable substitution. After several weeks of this, nearly all joy will be removed from your mealtime experiences, and the urge to overeat will become but a distant memory.

• As a weekend treat, plan a special meal of deluxe scrambled eggs, with cheese and green peppers and SPAM, but make sure that 3 out of the 12 eggs that you choose are completely rotten. This experience will effectively curb your ability to place hope in culinary aspirations well into the foreseeable future.

It may not be easy at first, but it will be worth it in the end! Why, just the other day, my hard work was rewarded with this little gem of encouragement:

I was sitting with one of my Iski buddies, waiting for the morning Bible teaching to start, when an older guy came over to me and said something in Iski that I didn’t catch. He repeated the statement, but it still didn’t make sense to me. I turned to my friend and asked him to help me out, and this is what I got back in the trade language:

“He gave you a clan name. He said that is your name now. It’s the name of one of our big trees. That type of tree casts a really big shadow. Like you. Because you’re fat.”

Yes, that’s right, YOU TOO could experience such uplifting, unsolicited observations from the people in your life! IF you stick to the program!