The Sex Diet

The Sex Diet is a sure-fire, can't-miss way of losing weight and keeping it off. In fact, it is foolproof.

I’ll describe it, and I’ll describe it from my own point of view, but this description is really a model. You may customize it by plugging in your own details.

It involves working with a personal trainer. This personal trainer is, by necessity, one’s ideal (or idealized) sex partner. Fill in your own blanks, but real world obligations and considerations are not to be considered.

This is a critical point. For the purposes of this blog post I’ll use the pronouns she and her, but remember this is only a template. Terms such as ideal and perfect are, obviously, highly subjective.

My trainer is a woman about my age, give or take a few years, with a pleasing face, a perfect body, and a well-oiled, finely tuned brain. I would train with her intensively for five or six months.

It might take a bit longer.

Each day would be similar to the next. We begin in an indoor, Olympic-sized swimming pool, which is home base for our sessions. We have the place all to ourselves – there isn’t even a lifeguard. I’ve had breakfast an hour or so before arriving, a carefully balanced meal of complex carbohydrates, protein and fresh fruit put together by my trainer.

I start by swimming a few laps. I swim naked, and my trainer, who does not enjoy the luxury of a name, is also naked. She stands at the pool’s edge, a clipboard under one arm, watching.

I’m not a swimmer, so it doesn’t take much to wear me out, at least not on the first day. After four lengths of the pool – there and back, there and back – I’m totally out of breath. I get out of the pool, heaving. My trainer allows me to catch my breath, and then we have sex, right there by the side of the pool. I’ll spare you the details, but this is a fantasy so it’s very enjoyable.

Afterward we lounge in a hot tub discussing politics, or an amusing item from the morning paper.

Before long I’m rested from the sex and the swimming. We get out of the hot tub and recharge with a quick glass of orange juice, freshly squeezed and on the rocks.

At the trainer's urging, I begin a series of stretches. The first positions I assume, she says, are inspired by da Vinci's Vitruvian man. "Visualize it," she tells me, and I do.

Next I sit on one of those padded gymnastics mats. The stretches that follow, she says, are "modified yoga." She encourages me to attempt a full lotus position. I can manage only a half.

After fifteen or twenty minutes of this I get back in the main pool and do four more laps. Then there’s more sex. It’s about 9am.

The balance of the morning is spent with these four esses: swim, stretch, sex and soak. There is an optional fifth, which is sauna. Maybe sixth for sweat.

Somewhere along in here, my trainer has me step onto a scale. It’s one of those fancy scales you usually only see in a doctor’s office, very precise, on which small weights are moved along runners. My trainer slides the little weights. Her brow furrows and she pouts ever so slightly as she records a number on her clipboard.

“So how much do I weigh?” I ask.

My trainer smiles. “You’re just right.” Then she pulls me down to the floor.

By 11:30 I’m ready for lunch. But first I spend half an hour lying face down on a massage table as my trainer’s talented hands knead my flesh. She also uses her elbows. “It’s a Swedish thing,” she says.

Then we have lunch. My trainer has prepared a meal as well-balanced as breakfast. Where she found the time to make it is a mystery.

This meal is a little heavier on the carbohydrates, because when we’re finished we’re going on a bike ride. We fill water bottles, pull on Lycra bike clothes, and set out. Our route is thirty miles. I’m not in shape to swim, but I bike a lot and feel like I could go just about all afternoon. We maintain a moderate pace and complete the ride in just over two hours. This includes the stolen moments at a secluded place, where we pull over and slip into the brush.

When we finally get back to our indoor pool, we strip off our sweaty bike clothes, shower together, and then soak in the gurgling hot tub.

By this time I’m getting fatigued. It is only mid-afternoon, but the exertion of the bike ride followed by the hot tub has me light headed. We retire together, the trainer and me, to a very comfortable bed, and snooze for about an hour. It is a deep and satisfying sleep, and dreamless.

•

After a few months of this, the pounds are melting away. New muscle replaces old flab. Before long I realize a form resembling the willowy, slender youth I once was.

The training continues. I begin fearing a relapse, regaining that excess weight if my training ends too soon. My trainer, too, recognizes this pitfall; we agree to keep at it for an indeterminate period of time.