This Christmas I’ve eaten enough to play Santa’s stunt double if I wanted to bring presents to a YouTuber kid. I’ve put on so much weight that, on clear days, I can be seen from the International Space Station, right next to Asia in order of magnitude. Faced with my landlord’s refusal to widen the front door, and frightened that the tires on my car might explode when I get in it, I decided to go on a diet. So I am sad, irritable, kicking inanimate objects around the house, and growling at passers-by on the street.

For breakfast, I am only interested in the coffee. I discreetly give the fruit to the birds that walk on the balcony for now, and as for the whole wheat toast, well I now understand why top models have such a bad temper. Instead of thinking about going out and flirting, they are almost always thinking about going to sleep.

Mid-morning I nibble on some nuts, which makes me feel exactly like Chip ‘n Dale when they’re having a slow day. Sometimes I’ll feast and gobble down a fat-free, unsweetened plain yogurt, which is kind of like slathering your palm with anti-wrinkle cream and eating it: It hurts and grosses you out at the same time. Other times, on the most auspicious days, I might enjoy some wonderful juice of various exotic fruits that tastes exactly like the cough syrup I used to throw up as a child. To avoid tasting it, I compensate by smoking three cigarettes at a time in each hand.

Lunchtime is the best moment of my day. A piece of grilled meat can make me feel what a real caveman must have felt holding his first cut of mammoth after eight hours of hunting, running, throwing, and howling through the jungle. Spread around the meat there is a garnish that would make an old cow salivate. Everything is green, only the texture changes — today’s was like a mountain of seaweed, but instead of tasting like seaweed it played on the palate as if I were trying to peel the vacuum cleaner cord with my teeth.

I never manage to escape the second batch of fruit. Too many eyes are watching me making sure I am committed to my diet, which only increases my anxiety and desire to escape and commit a crime: Rob a pizza parlor. It’s snack time. Chopped fruit and some nuts, not the tasty kind, but the hard, tasteless kind that looks like something out of a hospital snack for irritable bowel disease patients. I imagine that the manufacturer’s goal is that in the end, we don’t eat them out of pure apathy as a technique to lose weight, although maybe I’d rather cover my mouth with gaffer tape.

The hours left until dinner are eternal agony. I have changed my 15 liters of beer a day to two or three beers three times a week. Anyway, three beers on an empty stomach and after a week of dieting, can make me get up on the bar and start stripping, singing old military songs — the kind that makes nostalgic old hippy communist protesters from the 70s nervous.

Finally, sitting on the dining room table is my last meal of the day, a vegetable puree. With last night’s dinner, I ingested so much carrot that this morning I woke up wiggling my nose like Bugs Bunny and hopping around with my feet together and my palms on the floor. Looking in the mirror, I had turned as orange as Donald Trump’s skin, and I was worried for an instant that the Democrats were going to try to throw me in jail.

In addition to tobacco, for when the despair is unbearable, I am allowed to drink coffee with skimmed milk, or a few ounces of dark chocolate, which gets me going like a Harley Davidson in heat.

I am supposed to combine all this with some physical activity. But to be honest, after eating vegetables and fruits all day long, the only physical activity I have the strength for is throwing myself out of the window, and my traumatologist has strongly advised against it.

Despite it all, that’s life, and I am happy. I don’t like this diet in the least, but I learned long ago that being happy is something that baffles enemies. Guys like me are always at war, even when we have about as much energy and ambition for life as a slice of diet turkey previously run over by a tank. And besides, at the end of this adventure, I’ll feel like Pierce Brosnan wooing Stephanie Zimbalist with a subtle smile in Remington Steele. If it goes wrong, I can always settle with being like Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth.

Translated by Joel Dalmau