By golly! The long-awaited (by me, anyway…) diet guide and cookbook is live and well at Amazon! You can get it here, or click on the brand-new widget I just installed, at left, for your unending convenience.

This book, which contains four chapters on commonsense healthy eating and 125+ easy recipes, came about when an enthusiastic doctor tried to put me on blood pressure pills. He envisioned me swallowing the things for the rest of my life.

Well, they made me so dizzy I couldn’t drive my car. Since I live alone in a city with no credible public transport, that presented a problem. Cardiodoc didn’t seem to recognize the dilemma: he refused to adjust the dosage or the chemical.

My blood pressure was slightly high — not excessively so, unless I was having one of my occasional sh!t-fits — because a) middle-age creep had done crept up on me and because b) my idea of exercise was a brisk walk from the computer to the refrigerator.

Cardiodoc thought I needed to lose 22 pounds and made no secret of his heart-felt belief that I couldn’t do it.

I thought I needed to lose about 25 to 30 pounds, and, after some study at sites like the Mayo Clinic’s, I learned that the standard approach to slightly elevated blood pressure is actually to see if the patient can lose weight before prescribing drugs, and if so, to monitor the BP steadily to determine whether weight loss in fact helped and whether it continued to help.

So, without Cardiodoc’s permission, I quietly got off the vertigo-inducing, rash-making pills and built my own diet.

It’s based on the idea that salt and sugar have baleful effects, as do many of the chemicals used to make the various food-like substances that these days take the place of real food.

I designed what I called a “real-food diet” for myself, took 40 minutes each day to indulge in mild, non-excessive exercise (I hate banging myself around and am not a-gonna do it!), and started to watch the scale.

Lo! Forthwith I started to drop about two pounds a week. And incredibly, the weight loss continued at that pace until I got down to my target weight: 128 pounds, exactly in the mid-range of the recommended BMI for someone my height and gender.

Meanwhile, the blood pressure followed the same trajectory. Within four months, it dropped to a steady 125/75 — not bad for a 70-year-old woman!

This diet plan works. It’s easy, it involves no extreme theories or schemes, it’s not a crash diet, it’s not a fad diet, and it does not require joining a club or paying to subscribe to a commercial product.

How I Lost 30 Pounds in Four Months is a guide that simply engages common sense. Buy it. Try it. Review it.

Seriously: I do need reviews. If you will review the book at Amazon or Goodreads and in the comments section of any Writers Plain & Simple post, let me know, which review is yours and what books you’ve published, I will cheerfully return the favor with a purchase and an honest review of yours.

<3