A diet you can trust?

Terri Lambert
06 September 2008

It's high in fat and cholesterol, but Dr Robert Atkins' carb-free regimen is back in favour. Fat girl slim : the classic fry-up ticks all the boxes for weight-conscious film stars. If you was raised in the Eighties like I probably did, when sugar was rebranded as "energy", fat was the enemy, not carbohydrates. I went on the Atkins diet 5 years back after putting on 2 stone at school - I turned up at freshers' week weighing 8 stone and left weighing ten. I do not look glossy like Nigella, or well-developed like Kelly Brook. I look like a pudding ; my skin looks waxy and congested, my ankles and wrists swell up and my eyes vanish behind my cheeks.

I was distrustful about the diet, yet the concept of eating plenty of cream and bacon and cheese and cutting out carbohydrates looked less complicated than eating less. I just kept the beliefs in mind : cut back on the bread, pasta, potatoes and sugar, load up on cheese, ham and mayo. There wasn't any way I was going to chop out fruit, though. This is an example of the things you are meant to do in the 1st stages, to achieve the state of "ketosis" - whereby your body starts burning its fat stores. After a painless fortnight eating less carbs, the weight started to come off.

I became an Atkins fundamentalist : this brilliant thing had made me thinner and feel better, and I would have liked to tell everybody about it. But there grew a steady chorus of opposition to the Atkins idea. Proof appeared that staying on the diet for too much time was bad for your kidneys - it became just about the most arguable thing you might do with food. Whenever I explained to somebody that I was not eating carbs, they were often troubled. "Isn't that diet incredibly damaging?" they might say, typically before ramming roast potatoes or a crisps into their mouth. After a bit, I stopped fighting negative views about Atkins ; explaining, over and over again, that you did not have to follow the diet to the letter was uninteresting. I just kept quiet and loved the sense of getting lighter all the time. It took me about a year to lose the 2 stone I had put on. But knowing that it was working was enough.

Notwithstanding the first strength of the opposition to Atkins, the idea it's not fat, but sugar, that makes you overweight has caught on. It's gratifying to us Atkins converts that, after getting so much bad P. R. , we were right all along.

Jace said:
Each piece in the puzzle has to fit or the picture never gets finished. ?
07 September 2008 02:33:12

Rosiecat said:
Millions of people tr and diet each year and spend giant bucks on diet crazes, solely to fall off the van.
07 September 2008 05:17:57

Bobby Peck said:
They don't see the fantastic thing about sardines, and they never will.
07 September 2008 17:04:06

Quinton Gallegos said:
This may be a diet made for an Olympic performer,.
07 September 2008 18:02:16

activelobby4u said:
Lead researcher Helen Truby, of the College of Queensland, announcde : "These annoying findings suggestthat people remain resistant to the advice o 'eat more fruit and plants', even if they are recommended to as a factor of a modified weight reduction programme." Nutritive deficiency Critics of the Atkins diet have advocated that people who follow its low-carbohydrate regime run the possibility of becoming deficient in some key nutrients.
08 September 2008 07:13:24

J Rodriguez said:
Visitors who eat a bagel here may know why people are so particular about them.
08 September 2008 09:11:52

Shamar Conrad said:
Please please take my best congratulations. I mean this
15 September 2008 01:43:12

johnv said:
Oops apologies for being stupid. Thnx guys !
21 September 2008 17:37:41

Jace said:
he's wide of the mark
25 September 2008 04:43:03

Alejandro said:
Davila asseWted about eleven or 12 folks took part in that program, paying $5 every week through the second semester of the 2007 college year. ?
19 November 2008 05:37:44