Lexiphiliac Writeoff: finally got sick of being asked to autograph kids' "JigglyPuff" Pukémon cards
Written: Jan 03 '02 (Updated Jun 13 '04)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
| Helpfulness of Suport |
 |
|
|
Pros: you lose weight without having to subsist upon raw gravel and grapefruit
Cons: the plethora of lies and falsehoods you must cut through; also, people's commentary
The Bottom Line: ok for strong constitutions; for whiners, don't try it, as you will develop even more genital warts than you already have
|
|
|
| jkkelley's Full Review: Atkins Diet |
One thing that tends to happen to us as we age is this: too much butter, greasy McRodentburgers, muffins with that cream cheese stuff in them, and cheap stanko pizza will blimp you out. They will plump up your rump. Sides so gelatinous you lean over to spear a few more donuts and people praise your rhythm. We've all heard of a 'beer gut', but what about 'Chinese buffet buttocks'? 'Wendy's flabby thighs'? 'Dairy Queen jowls'?
(And while we are at it, the expression 'love handles', one of the stupidest ever invented by mankind, must be eradicated from the vocabulary. I charge you all never, ever to use it again no matter the provocation, and in so doing, to have done your part to make the world a little better place. If I catch you doing so, I'm going to cowboy up.)
It really sucks being hugely fat. I am not going to weasel and call it 'overweight' to make myself or anyone feel better about it--that's called 'enabling'--so get over it right now. The whole notion of cute euphemisms can, in fact, go squeeze a diseased pimple with Vice-Grips and then cook it in a Dutch Oven. (Say "ewwwwwwww!", once, with feeling.) If ever anyone had the right to call it what it is--fat, corpulence, blubber, lard, hugeness--it is I. And I will.
Not that I'm saying it's a character stain to be hugely fat, of course. But it's a very sad state to be hugely fat and not have the guts to cop to it, unvarnished. I wasn't overweight. I wasn't husky. I was FAT. (Still am, albeit less so.)
This is why I hold Camryn Manheim in such high regard. Not only is she a very beautiful woman, she is honest about what she is. Both qualities are compelling enough individually; were the year 1995 (before I met my wonderful wife), had I been asked to choose between Camryn and, say, Jennifer Lopez (whom I wouldn't even recognize on the street, unlike Camryn) for a date, I would knock stuff over in my hurry to pick Camryn.
To be specific, I was sufficiently blimpo as to weigh, at the top of my pachydermic game, no less than 320 pounds. When I heard Norwegian spoken, I plodded hastily in some other direction. "Ya sure, Olaf, I bet Dag fifty krona that he could not hit that Russian trawler with the harpoon gun..." I was a blumpkin, no question. I had to remember the appearance of my crotch area from distant, fading memory (there might even, for all I knew, have been a muff or two down there those days). I was in perilous danger of developing a set of bodacious boobs.
My nieces wanted to use my chins as sort of a proto-abacus. I looked like I'd been watching the "Buns of Cottage Cheese" workout video set in the same ardent manner as certain hardcore fundamentalists watch Benny Hill, or whoever that 'Christian' faith healer bunco artist is. ("Here, Benny, there is a demon in my pee-pee causing me to sin big time. Will you touch it and exorcise the demon? Hey, Benny, maybe if you were to suck, like one does with rattlesnake venom, it would help channel the healing energies.")
You get the idea. (How could you not? The metaphor is not only flogged, lashed and beaten to death, and not only thrown in the ditch, but the dust of its bones is rustled up by a cheap K-Mart broom.)
(So far as I'm aware, annexation's testicular sac is not especially fat, though I doubt I'll ever find myself doing an on-the-ground reconaissance of that particular anatomical region.)
I've now been on the Atkins Diet for five months. I've lost 51 pounds. I think I now have some room to talk now that I no longer need to be lightly oiled with Mazola in order to navigate the corridors of the house.
So what's this diet all about? When I started on it, as with most pop phenomena, everyone had heard of it but me. A Jonathan-come-lately.
Phase One: you are to eat no more than 20g of carbohydrates per day for two weeks, and you are to be fairly anal about it. This is called the "Induction" part. The reasoning is quite simple: we tend to eat like athletes (loading up on carbs), and our bodies burn the carbs and store up the fat like camels--especially when we don't live like athletes, who must have the carbs because they are going to burn them. Carb starvation means your body has to burn the lard.
As a practical matter, this will mean no sugar. No fruit. No milk. No potatoes. No bread. No pasta. No rice. No ice cream. No tortilla chips. No cheeseburgers at your local Scarf 'N Barf. If you start to think about what that leaves, you can see that you're going to have to get educated about carb counts. Which produces the First Benefit of Atkins: you develop an awareness of what you're shoving past your lips. You find that 20g of carbs, for example, is about six big tortilla chips. Or a half cup of rice. Or a hamburger bun. Or about two crystals of sugar.
Just in case you were still having fun, you're theoretically supposed to cut out caffeine, too. (Stimulates overproduction of insulin, so the diet book says. Makes me wonder if hyperglycemic diabetics could benefit from it.) I cut back but did not eliminate caffeine, and still lost the weight at a respectable pace.
What that leaves is meats, real cheeses, salads, some vegetables, oils, Fresca, Coors Light (only 5g per can!), dark red wine, and so forth.
Annexation's Bag O' Nuts, of course, is also low-carb, but let's not go that far...I digress.
The idea here is to induce ketosis, a state which results from your body burning fat. It gives your breath sort of a chemical reagent smell, and usually sets in within 48 hours of going on the diet. There are testing strips that you can buy (if you live in a real city) that will tell you if you're in ketosis, kind of like litmus paper. (Like, you take a whiz on them, in case I have to spell this out for you.)
I got through Induction by munching on pepperoni sticks and string cheese. At the end of fourteen days, I'd lost fifteen pounds. Something surely had to be wrong here, but no. The scales didn't lie. Thank the gods for Fresca and club soda--oral gratification without the guilt of hiring a prostitute.
Of course, fifteen pounds in two weeks is way too much, but I see the purpose: it'll make you believe that you really can lose le grand lard. Might even lose it before you retire (or die young and miss out on retirement).
Phase Two: simple. You add back a set amount of carbs to your diet until you find a level where you cease to lose weight. From then on, until your body changes at some point, you have a pretty good idea what will happen to you weightwise based upon your eating. You have total control, subject to the vagaries of life, of your weight loss rate. You also have a very good idea of how your body reacts to certain foods in concentration, because you've experimented with it under fairly carefully controlled conditions. In my view, losing the mucktuck is the secondary benefit to this diet. The primary benefit is that of education and confidence, being the Second Benefit of Atkins: You henceforth know you can lose weight if you want to.
I think that's what scares a lot of people about this diet. It might work.
If you truly want to transform most people into a state of quivering glop, tell them authoritatively that they are responsible for themselves and everything they do, and cannot blame it on anyone or anything else. Thus, the Third Benefit of Atkins: it deeply annoys people.
Health concerns: if you read the book (Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution), it tells you bluntly and forcefully that you must have a doctor's supervision in order to undertake this diet. This is a really good idea because not only are you going to change your diet significantly, but you're going to eat things that everyone is always telling you are certain to kill you of heart disease within a week. And you are going to hear it, twice a day, from the amateur nutritionists of the world--all of whom constantly complain that their methods don't work, though they're delighted to try and recommend them to you nonetheless.
Very well, Miss Amateur Nutritionist. Think about this. Are we not always being told that being even ten pounds overweight shortens our life expectancies? Ok. Now, what if I am a hundred pounds overweight? Just how long do you think I can expect to live at that weight, anyway? How many 90-year-olds do you know who are that much overweight? None. How many old farmers and housewives do you know who ate fat and fried foods all their lives and who are nonagenarians? Many. This is the argument that completely destroys opponents of the diet, at least from the standpoint of large-scale loss of blubber. If you are as fat as I was, you can either do as you are doing and face certain death by 60, or take your chances with cholesterol, fat, etc. and be a good bet to live into your 80s--with much higher quality of life.
I blew off the doctor advice, on the grounds that I wasn't really adding anything new to my diet, just subtracting stuff, and in any event planned to watch closely for adverse effects. (And also on the grounds that I don't generally like or trust doctors.) I, however, have the constitution of a fairly robust goat. If you have a sensitive system, any medical condition or other physiological weirdness, I would say that the doctor's supervision goes from optional to compulsory.
How you feel: the first week, I was pretty well douched; a little tired, had the raging trots. After that, I felt excellent, and I still do. In fact, frankly, I felt and feel better than I've felt for years, except when I break the diet for some reason, at which time I spend half the day contending with issues related to feces, if you get my drift. Some people report fatigue, but after the first week, I actually had more energy.
The diet also works as an appetite suppressant; you find you don't want to eat as much, which is helpful. You can still gain weight on this diet; you just have to override your own wishes and common sense in order to do so. If you gain weight on Induction, you either have an authentic glandular problem or you have a true gorging disorder, and either way, you need to consult a professional.
Your tastes will change. I've heard this from nearly everyone who stuck with it through Induction. When I rewarded myself with a massive pizza recently, it wasn't as good as I expected. Same for the Coke, first one in five months, with which I washed it down. I do not know what it is, but it sure helps you stick with it.
Our host's cojones: did you know that annexation encourages those who dispute the rules of the writeoff to perform suction upon said glands? I have heard a rumour (I won't say who started it, you cads...a pox on you for asking) that they are very large and will not both fit in one's mouth at the same time. I just thought that would count as a scad of useful product information. We all knew what 'Rocky Mountain Oysters' were, and we are now familiar with 'Michiana Oysters' as well...
Pitfalls: there are a lot of pitfalls with this diet. Many of them involve other people. If you want to succeed with it, you must prepare for:
People: my advice to you is to refuse to discuss the diet with almost anyone. Why on earth would I suggest this? Because people will bring you down. Everyone waits until they hear that it's working for you, then gives you a long list of reasons why it'll destroy you, how their cousin ended up with swollen pineal glands from it, how terrible it is to eat fat (we all know that it destroyed the Roman Empire), how it's the worst diet in the world, how they tried it but it made them sick, how it didn't work for them therefore it sucks David Lee Roth's lubricated phallus, and so forth.
I think people mostly make excuses for their own failure, or for their own unwillingness to educate themselves. The cold, hard truth is that you have to know your body and use good sense. Either is generally too much to ask of most of my fellow Americans. (freak369, tell me please... are the British any better about this, old chapette? latakiahaze?)
Gender: there is no getting around that women lose weight more slowly than men. But that's not a bug, it's a feature; women's systems seem to store fuel more efficiently than ours, which was probably a huge asset back in the days before pizza delivery. So it's harder for them to lose the fat. The only answer is that women will probably need to work harder at it to get the same result--or be patient with slower weight loss.
The good news is that since women tend to be more weight-conscious than men, they also are more aware of what they eat and have less need to develop that habit. They also tend to know more about nutrition. Before I began this diet, I was pretty much like Fabius, our new Labrador retriever puppy (who still has yet to find me any actual Labradors, clearly in violation of his charter): "Hey, there's some food. I can eat it! Who cares what it is!? Ok, I have to take a dump now." Women tend to give their dining a bit more thought. (Tend, I said, goddamnit. I've known women who had the culinary discernment of the Yellow Sea's tiger sharks, and appetites to match. Vagina possession, in and of itself, does not daintiness make.)
Health fragility: this is important. Some people's systems are more sensitive than others. If you have a lot of gastrointestinal problems, or blood sugar problems, or any other sort of susceptibility, you need to watch this diet more carefully than most, and modify it so that it fits your needs. If you're too lazy to pay attention to your own body, in my opinion, you have no business on this diet and are wasting your time--to say nothing of needlessly risking your health through a fairly radical change in diet.
This is especially true of the armies of people who feel that the fact that they don't like a certain food, or that it gives them the raging sphincter flow, means that they have A Food Allergy. It's not an aversion, understand. "It is a Food Allergy! I can't have it or I'll be in the hospital!" Why is it so many people are so eager for a medical condition, real or imaginary, to act as scapegoat for their own lack of scrotal/labial fortitude, discipline, or whatever?
Stupidity: if you are stupid, you must not attempt this diet. If you are a blithering idiot, you will do things like decide: "Well, if 20g of carbs is good, 5g would be even better!"--never mind the fact that a certain amount of carbohydrates are necessary to metabolize fat. If you're a cretin, you'll surmise: "The diet says pork rinds are low carb! That's all I'll eat!"--never mind that they aren't exactly nutritious. If you're an imbecile, you'll conclude: "This means I don't have to exercise!" No, of course not. Going from couch potato to couch yam will not make you any less of a spud.
One thing this diet has definitely done is exacerbate my general misanthropy. Like I needed that.
Plateaus: I have heard about these but have yet to hit one, though that could still come, and I theorize that the reason is because I creatively break the diet pretty often--but in a different way every time, and with an emphasis on complex carbs (as found in spuds and bread) rather than the useless ones found in alcohol and sugar. I notice that if I seem to be hung up at a certain weight, I should actually go eat something I really like that is high in carbs but which I haven't had for a long time. The next day I always seem to have suddenly dumped 2-3 pounds. Apparently your body needs to be taken by surprise or it gets into a groove in which it decides that it doesn't really have to answer to anyone (sort of like the post office).
Fumbling: once on the diet, if you fumble and fall, no sweat, just get back on. You simply won't lose any weight that day, and maybe the next. Your body can only store up to two days' supply of carbohydrates. If your tank of them was already on reserve due to the diet, remember, what's coming in is not excess to a full tank, but having to fill an empty tank. Were you to go out and exercise significantly afterward, you'd drain the tank even quicker. In fact, maybe that's a good personal discipline rule: if you bend the diet, you have to go out and walk for a full hour, or lift weights, or labour in the yard.
While it's better to bend rather than break the diet, if you're pretty sure you've eaten over 200g of carbs, you may as well eat 600 if you can hold them, due to the abovementioned storage tank limitations. But if you do, plan to spend the next 24 hours a short distance from someplace you can comfortably take several disappointing dumps.
On the topic of fumbling, I need to mention our distinguished host's testicles here once again, and point out that consistent fumbling with one's nuts is usually called 'pocket pool'.
Creativity: if you get creative you will find that there are a lot of good things you can have. For example, a walk through the grocery store checking product boxes will tell you just how much rice, refried beans, bread, pasta, and potatoes comprise 20g of carbohydrates. My suggestion is to work in increments of 20g. So, for example, let's say that a single potato is 50g of carbs. Half a spud wouldn't be all that much. Forty peanuts is about 6g of carbs, so about 125 is 20g. And so on.
Also, there are (papery-tasting) tortillas out there with low carbs. The Carb Solutions bars are actually pretty good. (The Atkins bars themselves are one of the nastiest food items known to (wo)man. Why prfstars insists upon chowing them I will never understand.) There are these chips called Keto Chips that have the consistency of softened cardboard but, when added to six big tortilla chips, can combine with a buttload of cheese to make some edible nachos.
Wine: I am advised by the good folks at Bookwalter Winery of the Tri-Cities (who were kind enough to put me in touch with their food chemists--thanks, homies, have some free cyber-ink), that a glass of really dry merlot has about 1.5g of carbs, almost all of which is from the alcohol. If you think there is anything to the stuff about red wine being good for your heart, if ever there were a time to drink it medicinally, this diet would be it.
Cheesecakes: for Christmas, prfstars (who really deserves better than to be mercilessly gaffed, joshed and ribbed by me in these reviews) sent me a couple of pre-made Atkins cheesecakes. These can be ordered from http://atkinscenter.com/atkins/default.asp, and come in three flavours, two of which at least taste precisely the same.
They're about the size and weight of a small Brie wheel and they ship packed in dry ice. Texture is a little crumbly and there isn't much sweetness, but the whole cake only has 24g of carbs. My generous friend added this characteristically candid observation: "if you tell them about the cheesecake, make sure to tell them that the fu_king shipping is more than the cake. It really would never make sense to order one." (meaning you'd want to buy several if you were ordering)
You will also find that some of the naturally low-carb stuff out there will suck a pirate's crab-infested shaft with commendable vigour. Example: I stopped in one of those big liquidation stores and saw a bunch of pepperoni sticks for sale, so I bought a couple packs, being that I normally have to go all the way across town to Costco to find such things in quantity. Now, pepperoni is supposed to be juicy. It is not supposed to be mummified. These tasted and felt like cold bacon grease stuffed into hard plastic tubes. I'm not by nature a wasteful man, and we already know that I have an appetite. When you see me pitch food into the trash can, you know it's irredeemable.
Milestones: you should not only have a goal, but milestones along the way--especially if, like myself, your every milestone will have the potential to affect the rotation of the earth. Ideally you would not reward yourself with food, but for me, that was too much to ask, and it probably will be for most people. Pick something you love that you've absolutely denied yourself, and every so many pounds, have that thing.
Loose flab: will, if you lose a couple of tons as I have, actually be useful as a primitive sail or parachute if you don't find some way to get it all to go away. So far mine seems to be drawing up at a respectable pace, which is nice because I had visions of it all ending up like a sort of grotesque skirt down around my knees. Real erotic.
Having discussed this with people who've lost even more long tons than me, I am told that it depends on how long you've been that fat; stretching seems to help. Touch your toes, stretch all around. The ideal thing would be weightlifting, which would a) build your muscle mass, b) burn some fuel and c) give the sloppy skin someplace to drape. Or take up a rambunctious sport, such as jai-alai or rugby.
That's a lot better idea than going in for cosmetic surgery that could kill you, anyway. (Although I've heard that the discarded skin actually serves a good purpose, being donated to burn victims for skin grafts, so if you are planning to have the surgery, have some more Key Lime Pie.) And if you're still worried about getting the skin to go away, remember this truly tragic but inarguable fact: you've never seen a photo of a survivor of prolonged malnutrition who had any loose skin.
Annnexation's shaggy scrotum: I just wanted to make reference to Mark's seedbag again, since I know how warm it makes our co-host feel.
Health maintenance: in addition to seeing a doctor, and having all the tests Dr. Atkins suggests, you are to take vitamin supplements. Nay, better you should commit a perversion, such as to actively root against the Broncos (who represent the highest calling in sports fandom: a team to be followed, loved, cheered on, and stuck with for decades...as opposed to, for example, the loathed, detestable, despised-by-all-right-thinking-folk Seahawks) than that you should undertake Atkins without taking vitamins.
You must also weigh yourself. I would keep track of it on a spreadsheet, so that you get as much info as possible about your pace. It's encouraging, too, to envision that after awhile, if you keep doing what you are doing, on such and such a date you can be discharged from Club Dirigible as no longer meeting the minimum membership standards. A good idea is to weigh in every two weeks, so that minor fluctuations don't become disheartening and trends come into focus.
Lastly, you must drink a lot of water. It's very difficult to drink too much. It may be less important in humid climates, but not by much. Water definitely speeds your weight loss--when I don't drink enough, I notice the difference. It is also one of the few liquids you are supposed to have, what with fruit juices, sugared sodas and caffeinated anything generally contraindicated. Green mint tea would be a solid option, especially if it didn't have caffeine.
When it's over: well, in a sense, it's never really supposed to be over. The program is that once you hit your target weight, you continue to live a low-carb lifestyle so that you keep the weight off. I don't think this sounds too hard, considering that if you've lost 121 pounds (as is my goal), you've lived the diet for more than a year. By that time, if you feel outrage at Natives' subsistence whaling, it will at least not be based upon fear for your own life should you happen to be swimming past their village.
I also don't want you to forget about annexation's bag o' balls, by the way, in case that wasn't clear before. They have become public figures, thus, public property. I call upon him to display them on his profile page, and I encourage you to join me in deriding him as a weiner (and even in going so far as to assert that the existence of the oft-discussed gonads is mythical) if Mark should fail in this charge. After all, like any man of reason, I can only go on faith for so long before I must have at least circmustantial proof.
Conclusion: this diet is not for everyone.
Like the later version of the Anarchist's Cookbook (the one the CIA published in the hopes that a lot of low-IQ would-be terrorists would blow themselves up with the nitroglycerine recipe), the Atkins diet is not for children, the frail, or morons. If you're of strong constitution and are willing to actually involve yourself in your own weight loss rather than dishing all the responsibility off onto a pill (rendering you almost a Communist by contemporary American standards), or if you're so fat that the risk to your health from dietary change is far less than the certain death you face due to Goodyearhood, you may well lose a lot of weight on it. Good luck.
Postscript, 6-13-04: I have learned that getting the diet going a second time is harder than the first. If I'd known that, I'd have stayed on it all the way the first time.
Now that our beloved corporations have learned a great secret--that all you have to do is label something 'low-carb' and watch it fly off the shelves, with absolutely no substance to the claim--this diet has gotten harder.
There's a way to cut through that, I find: stick to basic foods. Screw all these so-called low-carb processed foods, and eat the basic meats, cheeses and other stuff that is authentically low in carbohydrates. For your twenty grams, eat decent ones. And I made a major discovery:
All that crap about sugar alcohols not affecting blood sugar? It's a lie, and a filthy one at that. I tested it using those testing strips you can buy, to see if you're burning fat. I was doing fine on the diet, then I tried getting my carbs for a day from those supposedly low-carb sugar alcohol-sweetened candy bars. Bammo: blew me right off the diet, and I stopped burning fat. The part about carbs from fiber not counting, however, I've seen to be true through testing.
One last complaint: the tendency to say 'Only 3 Carbs!' Saying '3 carbs' is meaningless. It is 3 grams of carbohydrates. It is a measure of weight. Not that this bit of mental midgetry should really matter to you, because you can take my word: if you focus on basic foods, and stick to the diet, you have a chance to lose a ton. If you get cute with it, like getting sucked in by flashy marketing saying 'Only 5 Carbs!', you will probably spin your wheels. Good luck.
=======================================================================
This review is an entry into some sort of hemophiliac (or necrophiliac, or something like that) writeoff run by annexation and fragglemom, showing just what sort of standards they uphold. (My participation, obviously, says pretty much the same thing about my own questionable values.) The details are on the profile page of annexation, he of the bodaciously ballyhooed ballbag. Here are the rest of the gang--go read 'em:
29th_candidate
annexation (co-host, and well known on Epinions for his scrotum)
artbyjude
badkittym (who clearly lacks a scrotum, but has ovaries the size of grapefruits)
bijou
brendametcalf
blackmonolith
dastr8poop
davidk93
deaser26
dgturtle2
difrentisgood
fallenjesusboy
farfetched
fez_monkey
flamepillar
fragglemom (co-hostess, and far as I know, not known for her scrotum)
galileo365
imokliel
jsallen
kris-kochanski
kristinafh
lattechick
lessaleigh
love_less
maggsmomm
mauriced
natch
nifer
obiwanjabroni
officer
petra
phixed
pogomom
prfstars (not a hostess, but known as a conaisseuse of scrota)
psychovant
repulsemonkey
roxymarie
seraphofhades
shadow_dream
sloucho
sordid-1
spyder550
suspecterrain
xiphoid
young1028
Recommended:
Yes
Approximate Monthly Cost (US$) helifino
Food Variety Restrictions A short list of allowed foods
Restrictiveness of Portions Gorge all you like
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
jkkelley
|
 - Top 1000 |
|
Location: Ana-Tolia
Reviews written: 79
Trusted by: 308 members
About Me:
Farewell, Mr. Grover.
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.