Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

One small item of pride for me is the fact that while I have been overweight pretty much my entire life, I've never tried the Atkins Diet. Just about every other person I know who has ever wanted to lose weight has done so, and in every case they've done it for a few months, taken off twenty or so pounds, declared victory and abandoned it, and then put the weight back on. It sounds miraculous, indeed: eat all the fat and protein your heart desires, just cut the carbs back to almost nothing, drink four gallons of water a day, and watch the weight melt away; it's the "miracle" nature of the thing that makes it so alluring, I guess. I've never done it because I've never been able to convince myself that eating one thing -- protein -- for an extended period of time is healthy. I still believe that, despite the recent studies that have the Atkins-believers dancing with joy.

Not so fast, folks.

These studies contain, from my point of view, only one real surprise: that people on the Atkins diet don't experience a sudden spike in their cholesterol. Other than that, though, these studies are basically telling me what I already knew. Is it really a surprise that if you go on the Atkins diet for six months, you'll lose weight? We've all known people who have done that, so the studies aren't really yielding any great revelations. And I fear that people are not reading the fine print, where the researchers admit that the studies aren't indicative of what will happen to people who go on the Atkins diet for longer periods. Real, permanent weight loss -- where you don't put it back on as soon as you stop doing whatever it was that made you lose the weight -- is a matter of lifestyle, and I have yet to see any evidence at all for Atkins as a lifestyle. Don't show me people who have done the Atkins diet for six months. Show me someone who went on the Atkins diet in November, 1997 -- and is still on it. Show me that person's cholesterol; show me that person's overall health. Then I'll be impressed. I've never encountered a single person who has managed to stay on Atkins for anything longer than a hockey season. We all know that the Atkins diet works, in that one loses weight while doing it. But I see no evidence of an Atkins lifestyle.

I've also seen people suggesting, in the wake of the studies "confirming" Atkins, that we should return to the diet that prehistoric man enjoyed. The problem with that, as is explained so well here, is that we don't live like cavemen. We don't hunt and gather our food, we're not nomads, and in any case, there is a vast difference between the meat of a wild boar or a deer and that of a domesticated, grain-fed steer. There are also numerous cultures around our planet that eat heavy amounts of grain-based foods, who also have far less incidence of obesity than America does. Considering that, I have to conclude that "All protein, all the time" does not seem terribly adequate.