The Bizzaro World Diet

My husband and I started the Atkins diet when it became clear that our low-fat, low-cholesterol ‘healthy’ diet we had been following since his heart attack was making us huge. I received the book from my mom, who had successfully followed Atkins in the past. She and dad lost a lot of weight on it. I read the book cover to cover, and researched a lot of the information in it on the internet before we started it. I gotta admit though, that starting Atkins after months and months of preaching by the ‘healthy heart community’, made me feel like I woke up in Bizzaro world.

Bacon and fried eggs for breakfast? Get out of here! Cheeseburgers for lunch (without the bun), a nice juicy steak for dinner, no fruit (no fruit? have my dreams come true?). Lots of salad, cheese, cream, butter, good lord, I am in heaven. I’m thinking, “I NEVER have to eat brown rice again! Yippee!” Remember when Woody Allen woke up in the movie Sleeper, and everyone was eating steaks, smoking cigarettes and drinking booze? That’s what the Atkins diet it like. Every principle for nutritious eating we knew, thrown out the window.

We’ve given up a few things we like: bread, mashed potatoes, and anything with sugar in it. (Thank God for Splenda®). My husband loves fruit, so for him this is a trial. We do get to add fruit back into the diet once we’re a little farther along, though. I could live the rest of my life very easily without it. It’s not all red meat either. We eat lots of chicken, turkey and the other white meat, pork. And of course, I spent money on a good supplement to make up for the vitamins we’re not getting from the food we eat.

The only downside to the diet is that it seems like I spent the entire first week of it in the kitchen, learning new ways of cooking the food we could eat. I bought a great cookbook, “500 Low-Carb Recipes” by Dana Carpender. We have delicious desserts now. In fact, we eat so much that it doesn’t seem right to be losing all the weight. Our cholesterol levels are down, my husband’s blood pressure has stabilized at an all time low. Our energy levels are way up. It just doesn’t seem possible.

In the three weeks we’ve been on the Atkins diet, I’ve lost nine pounds and my husband has lost twelve pounds. He’s getting more comfortable with the notion that the once forbidden foods are actually making him healthier. It’s a bizarro world diet, for sure.