I’m fairly disturbed by Dr. Atkins’ death report. I love that diet, and to hear that he was obese when he died is frightening. Granted, the diet is impossible to stick to in the long-term, but in the space of overnight, the poster child for the diet’s success has now become its warning label.
In all fairness, though, I do believe that he gained significant weight while he was in a coma (although 75 pounds is a little hard for me to swallow). When I was in the hospital on IV fluids for four days last September, I gained 15 pounds (which I did lose. And gain back. And lose. And gain back at Christmas. And lose again — so far it’s gone for good). So if he were in the hospital for two months and he bloated at the same rate I did, 75 pounds doesn’t seem all that bad in comparison.
One reason the Atkins plan has been so attractive to so many is that it claims to give you good heart health while seeing fast weight-loss results, which is what keeps people sticking to the diet — it’s really hard to get discouraged when your clothes start to fall off of you. I never could figure out how your cholestorol starts to drop on this animal fat-friendly program, but let’s face it, at age 29, I’d rather look better than worry about what my innards are doing. 🙂
In any event, I’ll bet the South Beach Diet crew will start overhyping their products — this is their best marketing opportunity yet. And I keep meaning to start that diet anyway. I did, however, cut out sweets in late January as well as start drinking a lot of water, and I’ve lost 12 pounds doing just that. My idea of dieting used to be that I had to eat all the sweets in the house so that the cupboards would be empty when I was ready to start a diet. But you know that doesn’t work — when there’s not a morsel of food in the house, that’s when you get an overwhelming urge to drive through Popeye’s for some fried chicken goodness. 🙂 So I gave away the sweets or pitched them, and that, my friends, seems to have made all the difference.