November 15, 2002
“When I was on Atkins, it was easy,” said Jody Storch, a vice president of Peter Luger Steak House. “I had a steak and creamed spinach for lunch every single day.” And a year ago, she said, the restaurant bowed to demand and made a rare change to its menu, adding an appetizer of broiled bacon strips that had previously been known only to long-time regulars. “Now we serve over 400 pounds a week,” Ms. Storch said. “Low carbers love it here. They can even have dessert: a bowl of plain whipped cream.”Let me just say that Teresa and I started this diet in mid-July, and I have now lost 35 pounds. Despite, while travelling, throwing it to the winds on more than one occasion. [11:32 AM]
I was Back East for a wedding a few weeks ago. An old college friend claimed to have lost "about 100 pounds" on the Atkins diet (starting from 400), and claimed that occasionally "throwing it to the winds" was actually part of the whole deal. Thus his ability to nosh on wedding goodies . . . and several weeks previous, on apples.
I'm . . . not dubious, but worried, about Atkins. I'm glad folks are losing weight, but what about side effects? My friend is diabetic, and rather sedentary.
I guess I wish that Atkins had insisted that "walk five miles a day" had been part of the program.
Yeah. I lost 12lbs in about 6 weeks this past summer, mostly by dumping all carbos (breads, sugars etc) and running three times a week. (I must say, one of the things I like most about the diet re: the Times story is still being able to have, er... hard liquor (ahem). Recommend it dessert any time.)
I am once again being strongly tempted by Atkins. It would be nice to have a weight-loss method that didn't involve spending quite so much time at the gym.
If we were telepathic cops it would be the @kins Diet, right?
On the Atkins diet, what happens when you achieve your desired weight? This is the place where most diets fail and why so many Americans are so fat. Once the diet is over the body begins to store fat against the next famine.
Avram: Been reading Bester?
MKK
Avram: That's the thing that bothers me about Atkins, actually. If you develop the habit of going to the gym, you're going to likely keep doing it; and going to the gym has positive effects beyond simple weight loss. From the little I've read Atkins is focused on weight loss and weight loss alone.
Personally, I won't do Atkins because I'm not willing to give up the things it'd require giving up.
Any suggestions on keeping a vegetarian low-carb diet? Lots of veggies, even with cheese, is not enough for a meal: starches are a mainstay.
Simon,
What about egg whites? Are they outside your diet? Boiled eggs and dump the yokes. Great protein, no cholesterol.
(This from my Slovenian mother-in-law...)
The Atkins book is repeatedly clear about exercise: if you're not at minimum walking for half an hour every day, you're not doing the Atkins program even if you are following the diet strictly. It also discusses that when you reach goal, it's just as hard as on any diet to stay at the lower level of eating--you lose the appetite suppressing quality of being in ketosis, and you still have to count something, it's carbs instead of calories.
As for vegetarians, there is very little material about that in the book. At one place he mentions that strict vegetarians can't do Induction, and that "the food selections on a regimen that restricts carbohydrate and simultaneously excludes animal foods are limited." He goes on to say that most people who won't eat animal foods are too bored on Atkins to do it permanently.
I've lost 30 pounds in two months, and during that time I was only strictly on Atkins for the first two weeks; I've had something off the plan at least one day a week, and sometimes for a 3 to 5 day stretch. But even when I eat off the plan, I eat more sensibly, I eat less quantity, and I have kicked my constant snacking habit (because I'm genuinely not hungry all the time any more).
As a long-time starch & sugar addict, I'm amazed that I've been able to do this at all, but what I've found is that if you are eating what's allowed, you really don't miss what's not allowed so much. Cream is a wonderful thing, I'll tell ya.
Having an exercycle in front of the TV is useful - I do about a half hour a night. (On the nights when I go out, I reckon London is strenuous enough to be exercize all by itself.)
I needed to relieve my knees of a 30-lb burden in a hurry and it's worked. I do cheat at least once a week but it doesn't seem to hurt. And the creamed pumpkin and sweet potato soup was delicious.
Kris: That relieves some of my concerns about the diet. None of the comments I've read by people who're actually doing the Atkins diet (until yours) have mentioned exercise; most of them follow the lines of Avram's (i.e., if I do this, I don't have to go to the gym).
I'm still not giving up my bread and my beer, though.
Kris makes the point that I've noticed (and I've lost, oh, close to 85 pounds on this diet over the last three years.)
On a conventional low-fat diet, I was always hungry. On a low carbohydrate diet, I'm *rarely* hungry. This is a huge difference.
And, yes, excercise is important. I take the stairs when I can at conventions and work, and I hike -- usually around 10-15 miles a week in the winter, closer to 30-40 a week in the summer.
Avedon: I find your words encouraging. I've never been much of a sugar junkie, but I never met a starch I didn't like. And one of my favorite foods in the entire universe is sourdough bread. My recent trip to London and Ireland demonstrated to me that perhaps my knees could also benefit from carrying around a few less pounds. Not until after the holidays though.
MKK
John Farrell: Egg whites? I thought that avoiding cholesterol was not a feature of the low-carb diets.
Eric Olson: If you say you got hungrier eating carbohydrates than avoiding them, I must perforce believe you, but I wonder what was going on here, as most people find starches filling and have problems on a diet without them.
Most of the posters here seem to be describing low-carb as a diet in the strict sense, one that you're on specifically to burn fat and lose weight, not a diet in the loose sense of what one regularly eats. The on/off ping/pong diet cycle is a prospect I wish to avoid, but people talking about being on Atkins with occasional days off suggests that it might be useful to just try cutting down on one's carbohydrates without aiming for active fat-burning.
Simon,
Egg whites? I thought that avoiding cholesterol was not a feature of the low-carb diets.
This is true, but I notice often people do want to avoid cholesterol, especially if they're not adding exercise to their diet. Which is why I mentioned it.
Silly me. By all means, if cholesterol isn't an issue for you, then, cool! take take the whole egg!
Josh: most of them follow the lines of Avram's (i.e., if I do this, I don't have to go to the gym)
Actually, what I said was that it might keep me from having to spend quite so much time at the gym. The exercise routine I'm currently doing involves three hours of weightlifting, three times a week. (I do 45 minutes on the treadmill or some other cardio work the other days.) It works while I'm unemployed, but I don't think it's compatible with fulltime employment.
Stefan, as a diabetic, your friend _really_ shouldn't be on a high-protein diet. In addition to the side effects it can have in nondiabetics, well, I'll let the American Heart Association speak for me: "A very-high-protein diet is especially risky for patients with diabetes, because it can speed the progression, even for short lengths of time, of diabetic renal disease."
For anyone else who wants to read up on the side effects, I recommend two sites. If you search for Atkins at americanheart.org, the fourth result is the pdf I pulled that quote from. It has plenty more info. You'll also find additional information on high-protein diets (long-term success rates, etc.) at quackwatch.org, which is a cool site anyway.
I wrote: "most of them follow the lines of Avram's (i.e., if I do this, I don't have to go to the gym)"
Avram wrote: "Actually, what I said was that it might keep me from having to spend quite so much time at the gym."
It occurred to me after I posted that comment that you might not be engaging in understatement. Sorry, didn't mean to impugn your commitment.
"The exercise routine I'm currently doing involves three hours of weightlifting, three times a week. (I do 45 minutes on the treadmill or some other cardio work the other days.) It works while I'm unemployed, but I don't think it's compatible with fulltime employment."
Hotpoint calls for *three* *hours* of weightlifting? Bloody hell, no wonder you want to spend less time at the gym. Back when I was going to the gym regularly, I was doing a full workout hitting the major muscle groups, and that only took about an hour. I enjoy lifting, but not enough that I'd want to do it for three hours at a shot...
Simon: the metabolic effects of carbohydrates and protein are very different. Carbs, espcially simple sugars and refined flours, tend to up the body's production of insulin. But insulin burns them up pretty quickly leading to lower blood sugar levels and hunger. Protein is metabolized much more slowly, avoiding spikes. This is greatly simplified, I am not a nutritionist, nor do I play one on the Internet. But I have hypoglycemia and a family history of diabetes.
MKK
MKK
Josh, on a good day I can get it done in two hours. The book claims it only takes an hour, but that's just plain impossible, especially since the workout starts off with five minutes of aerobic exercise, and ends with another long stretch of aerobic work (25 minutes at the beginning, more in later weeks), and the stretching alone would swallow up the remaining time. Maybe someone in better shape to start off with could get it done in 90 minutes or so, but I can't.
Simon: Explaining that would take pages. Do some research into insulin resistance, and the insulin/glucogen cycle. Short version. In some people, insulin resistance has led to an excess of insulin in the bloodstream, which causes the body to prefer to store blood sugars as fat, which leads the body to activate the hunger reflex.
I have a seriously overweight friend who went on Atkins and reported the same initial wondrous results I'm reading here. She also exercised. Didn't last. Now she's much fatter than before, just as critics of crash diets predict.
I've never tried Atkins, and don't intend to. "No free lunch," applies to lunches too, after all.
Sigh. Well, I investigated the Atkins diet this weekend, with particular interest in the maintenance level. It is to laugh. No sugar ever at all. A carbohydrate level roughly 1/3 of what the average person actually eats. I haven't gone and looked up the specific grams of various items but it looks like it wouldn't be much more than a couple of pieces of bread or some fruit. And the way you establish your 'safe' intake of carbs for the rest of your life is to gradually up your intake, *until you begin to gain weight* and then drop back 1 level.
So you see, they tell you that if you don't follow what is essentially a very restrictive regimen for the rest of your life, you'll gain the weight back. This is the big failure spot of most diets, because that is what nature has designed your body to do, especially if you're female. Once the famine is over, you start storing fat to help you through the next one.
There's no way I can see myself eating like that for the rest of my life, so I can't really afford to give it a try.
MKK
John Farrell: Now they're saying that high-fat diets actually lower blood cholesterol. (AP report, found on Salon's news log.)
Eric Olson: No offense, man, but I can't see going off to do research on insulin resistance just for the casual purpose of collating a piece of standard conventional wisdom ("carbohydrates fill you up") with your contradictory experience.
Mary Kay: I was afraid of that. What I'd like is a food regimen that takes advantage of the wisdom in Atkins to help lose weight without going on a crash diet. Unfortunately, from your description, even the Atkins maintenance diet sounds like it requires a lot more coordination than chewing gum and walking at the same time.
Simon: According to DR ATKINS' NEW DIET COOKBOOK, at maintenance level you can have 40-90 grams of carbohydrate/day. And no sugar at all. If I'm reading the carb values correctly, a medium sized ear of corn on the cob is 77 grams of carbs. Yeah, right.
MKK
Simon, the best way to diet is to not deprive yourself of any food source in favor of another, but just to cut the overall calories (and up the exercise, if you haven't already).
The weakness in a lot of diets, which the Atkins diet exploits, is that they tend to go overboard on the "only eat carbohydrates; fat and protein are evil" hypothesis. While this means that you can cut your calories and still eat quite a bit of food, it ignores a couple of things about the fundamental workings of hunger and metabolism.
Fat serves as a wonderful signaler of satiety. Something happens shortly after you ingest fat that tells your body you've eaten and it's okay to stop. The nice thing about it is that it doesn't take a whole lot of it to do it. However, you do have to be patient enough to let it catch up and not so intent on eating that you ignore the signal. Oh, and fat also carries a lot of food's flavor and is required for absorption of certain nutrients.
Protein is also an important part of any meal when you're dieting. As Mary Kay pointed out, the readily digestible calories of carbohydrates can spike your blood sugar (particularly if your body is bad at regulating blood sugar--something it gets worse at as it carries extra weight). Fat takes a little longer to be metabolized, but not much. Protein takes much longer.
Why is this important? Two reasons. The most obvious is that dropping blood sugar signals hunger. The second is that after a spike, your blood sugar levels tend to dip below normal. This can cause all sorts of ugly things: fatigue, headaches, and nasty mood swings, to name a few.
You're really better off while dieting to play mix and match foods. Make sure you get a little bit of everything in each meal, and don't let anyone tell you that any kind of food is evil (except maybe for German food). The occasional piece of apple pie with cinnamon ice cream is a perfectly healthy dinner and if it keeps you happy and on your diet, so much the better.
For what it's worth, Erik Olson's supposedly "contradictory experience" is the same as mine, and Teresa's, and Tom Doherty's, and everyone else I know who's done this diet. We're told that "carbs fill you up," but there seems to be some evidence that, at least in the quantities in which modern Americans tend to consume them, carbs make you hungry for more carbs.
It may well be that if we all ate perfectly and exercised uninterruptedly from childhood on, the balanced diets of nutritional orthodoxy would be fine. But for those of us with broken insulin/glucogen cycles, getting from here to there on a standard low-cal diet can be unolikely.
Here's the thing: Maybe this is all wrong, but so far, my body seems to think it's right. And it's been over four months. I'm down 35 pounds (from 215 to 180), I feel sharper, and I'm getting more done. I'm also getting a lot more exercise because it's not uncomfortable to move around any more.
One of the reasons I'm seriously considering eliminating comments is that, while I have the time and energy to write a web log, and even to engage in a certain amount of dialogue about what I write, I'm finding that I really don't have whatever it takes to argue about every single thing I say. Sometimes I'm up for an argument. Sometimes I just want to say "this is my view," to register agreement with others who have more energy for the issue at hand. The trouble is, Electrolite has become a place where, if I'm not ready for a big fight over something, I just don't discuss it. Say, remember when Electrolite discussed a broader range of subjects?
I'm not surprised when people react confrontationally to political polemic, but I have to just scratch my head when people go to this much trouble to post on my weblog how wrong I am about the diet I'm on. (Does anyone recall that I started this thread with a mere personal observation, not a polemic?) And when hitherto-unseen people post in order to link an anti-Atkins web site and lecture me about "no free lunch," I find that I harbor the uncharitable suspicion that this isn't a regular reader, it's someone with Google, an agenda, and a lot of free time. Understand: the suspicion is probably unwarranted, and no one need defend themselves. I'm talking about my own state of mind, not levelling serious charges.
I notice that a lot of the best blogs don't have comment sections. Some of them post plenty of letters from their readers, too. That's how we used to do it when we were fanzine editors.
Okay, Tresy, so some nameless overweight friend of yours tried the Atkins diet, then quit trying, and -- golly! -- she stopped losing weight! Not only that, but since she's gone back to the habits that made her overweight in the first place, she's gotten even heavier!
Tell me again why you think that's worth mentioning?
Your anecdote says nothing whatsoever about the Atkins diet. The outcome you describe is the same one your nameless friend would have had if she'd done that with any diet. It doesn't confirm what "critics of crash diets predict," unless they all go around mouthing platitudes like "Diets don't work if you don't follow them."
Anything else? You say you've never tried Atkins, and don't intend to. Fine. It's a free country. I can't see why you think it's a topic of general interest; but hey, it takes all kinds.
Finally, not only does your closing line -- "No free lunch," applies to lunches too, after all. -- not make much sense; it wouldn't make any more sense if it were correctly punctuated.
Patrick, recollect that one of us (was it you or me?) posted about the Atkins Diet not long after we started it, and that some poster we'd never seen before felt obliged to pop up and give us a condescending lecture about how we were Eating Wrong. It wasn't the first time I'd seen that happen.
I think people whose pleasure it is to do a Superiority Dance about dietary habits are one of those less-common but definitely recurrent online syndromes, on par with those guys who obsessively go around posting homophobic drivel, in detail, in one inappropriate venue after another. After about the third time you see one, you start suspecting they didn't come here for the hunting.
Or maybe I'm just being grumpy.
Patrick, I apologize if you took either of my posts to be criticism of you or a diet that has helped you. I specifically pointed to other web sites to answer a question/comment about side effects _because_ I didn't think everyone would be interested in slogging through all the information. It's kind of like having to watch those prescription commercials without a remote.
I did go rather overboard on the information Simon was interested in, but I blame it on my enthusiasm for a diet that is working for me. I can't do traditional Atkins, for various reasons, but I'm more than happy to point out what it has over low-fat diets and take advantage of it. I hadn't really realized how long the comment was until I saw it posted.
I hope you keep the comments. Your readers often add something interesting, including the contradictory viewpoints.
Hard-Hitting Moderator: Teresa Nielsen Hayden.
Comments on I'll have the bacon double cheeseburger, please, but hold the bun, I'm on a diet::