High-Calorie health supplement drinks, the appetite of a wolf and authoritative walks around the Ross Creek Reservoir have all failed to retrieve my lost 13kg.
There has been loose talk of muscle tone being down.
I checked my slim body in the bathroom mirror before climbing into the spa, and indeed, muscle tone was down.
In fact, muscle itself was nowhere to be seen.
Had I turned sideways and poked out my tongue, I would have been mistaken for a zip.
I have decided therefore to build up muscle tone.
I had tried this in the past, so the plan was far from folly.
I possess an almost enviable line-up of home fitness equipment - a Pro Form 715 SMR pedalling thing, and two small green 2kg hand weights bought for a song at a South Dunedin junk shop.
I used the weights for a couple of months and did notice discernible muscle tone forming.
Slowly.
"God, what I would give for arms like that!" squawked a woman friend at the time, someone who moved only in circles of the beautiful and well-formed.
She then asked me to feel her own arms.
"You see?" she said, "Pudgy! I want really skinny arms like yours."
So I binned the hand weights.
But I tell you, this Pro Form 715 SMR is really quite a thing.
The bike is a futuristic workout cycle incorporating an EKG Grip Pulse sensor.
It has an air fan which recreates the atmosphere of cycling outdoors, and the sensor from the EKG Grip Pulse provides heart rate readings at regular intervals.
Phwoar! So it was time to turn this beast loose once again.
Unfortunately, the beast had been declawed, as some waterhead had inexplicably dumped it down on its side, throwing the magnets out of alignment.
No longer could I cycle in the belief I was in the Tour de France, revelling in the colossal speed with which I was whooshing up the Pyrenees' stiffest slopes.
Without EPO.
All that greeted me now for feedback was a digital screen as blank as Phil Goff's face.
And as Oscar Wilde once said, and I'm paraphrasing, there is nothing more forlorn than an unlit digital display of 88:88.
I cycle on the lowest level of resistance.
But this can still be a test if you have lost 13kg.
I currently find I am performing around 20% as well as three years ago.
My rigorous hand weight sessions in front of the telly, involving routines most physiotherapists would say cancel each other out, are operating at a similar percentage.
But it is early days.
I check my body nightly in the well-lit cruelty of our 900mm bathroom mirror.
Sigh.
I am aware it is wholly inappropriate to refer to a human being as a vegetable, but I am quite happy referring to myself as a series of vegetables: my arms hang limply like spring onions, my thighs are kumara, my calves carrots, and my feet lie sullenly at the bottom like leaves from a leek.
Were I of an entrepreneurial bent, I would hoodwink Creative New Zealand out of $50,000 for an installation in the Dunedin Public Art Gallery (Dwindling Muscle Tone In A Recession: Dunedin 2010).
But I'm not.
I fear lest no amount of work on the Pro Form 715 and the little green weights will turn this around, but I am at least determined to give it a go.
I do now at least have an answer for that perennial question fired at me by friends in the street - Hi Roy, whatcha bin up to?
"I have been working out," I will reply, "can't you tell?"
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
