Copy editor Joe Westerfield has been controlling his appetites recently. Here is his encouraging report:

Last year about this time I went in for my annual physical. Since this was my first post-50 physical I was expecting all of the fun new tests and scopies that come with the territory. I was not expecting a jump in my cholesterol of 130 points to 242.

Of course the doctor prescribed Lipitor. That’s what doctors do. Still, mine doesn’t prescribe drugs in a knee-jerk fashion. So I was pretty concerned.

I don’t like drugs. There are drugs that can treat everything, but  not many that cure anything. I know too many people who go on drugs who don’t go off them. They just adjust the dosage or move on to bigger and better drugs. Chances are if you go on a drug, especially one like Lipitor, you won’t come off, at least not anytime soon.

So when it came to Lipitor I decided to throw caution to the wind and ignore doctor’s orders. After all, I was at 242, and 240 was the beginning of the danger zone. I should be able to get it down three points without signing my life over to Pfizer just yet. The first thing I did was examine my diet. The two eggs and sausages on the weekends were out. Butter gone. Red meat the same. That was easy. Then I looked at the label of my low-fat yogurt that I used to make my daily protein shake. As it so often does, life was imitating Seinfeld. The company had recently eliminated its fat-free yogurt and I had been using the so-called low-fat version. Low-fat, it seems, was 25 percent of my recommended daily allowance per serving. The kicker was that there were about 32 servings per pint. One lick and you were at the limit. A half a cup and you were practically injecting paraffin into your aorta.

The worst part about a low-cholesterol diet is that it is so bland--lots of walnuts, skim milk, vegetables, soy whatevers and more walnuts. If someone ordered pizza, I could eat the box, with a little sand or dust for variety. Usually I’d bring walnuts. And there isn’t a restaurant out there to help you. You won’t see trans fats anywhere on a menu in New York, but butter has replaced them. Dairy is everywhere; milk and cheese are in every dish. And soups are in a beef base. To be fair to restaurants, if they catered to my needs, they would be out of business in a month. If Danny Meyer had a heart-healthy menu, he’d be as famous as me--eventually. But I do wish that once in a while they would toss me a bone, a chicken bone, broiled, with a side of walnuts.

If anything kept me on my diet though it was the side effects of Lipitor. If you just watched the commercial with Robert Jarvik, you’d think that the drug might affect your liver a little and wreak havoc with your hairline. The print ads and brochures are a little more damning with columns of cautions and side effects in six-point type.

I have my own very personal, very unscientific interpretation of side effects. If a company mentions one on television, it got sued and lost. If it’s on the box their being sued and it’s up in the air—and the company think it will lose. And if a side effect is in six-point type in a brochure, the company knows it is bad but hasn’t been caught yet. And unless the side effect is a four-hour erection, I am not risking it.

I was also encouraged by the news stories that came out about Lipitor over the past year. The first said that even though the drug did lower cholesterol it didn’t lessen one’s chance of getting a heart attack. Now in medical matters I am into the whole Zen of the thing. If someone loses 180 pounds, none of that is bad fat. But if your cholesterol goes down and your risk of a heart attack stays the same, what are you in it for?

And Jarvik apparently isn’t a cardiologist, but he does talk like one on TV. He’s not much of an oarsman either. Truthfully though, none of that bothered me much because if you believe a paid spokesman about any drug, you probably should buy it. If the product doesn’t kill you, something else will. It’s called thinning the herd.

All this news helped me persevere. With a few exceptions, like birthdays and holidays, I stayed on my diet: cardboard, dust and walnuts.

And after a year of eating my body weight in walnuts and soy, I got my latest numbers: 126. That’s a 116-point drop, a typical day on Wall Street, but for me it’s a big deal. No Lipitor. No side effects. It’s amazing what can happen when you take medical matters into your own hands.

So I’m preparing to celebrate at a French restaurant—don’t hold the sauce, for one day at least. Snails, frogs legs, butter and not walnuts. But if the walnut industry is looking for a spokesman, I’m not cheap but I can be had.