The Good Doctor Atkins

I sure am happy that Doctor Robert C. Atkins developed and promoted the Atkins low carb approach to eating and living!

I know that he didn't "invent" the concept of low carb eating himself, as at least some people have likely eaten low carb for many, many thousands of years! Take the Inuit (for example) and other groups of people on the planet who have subsisted on a primarily low carb diet for ages.

Doctor Atkins did develop a specific plan towards eating low carb that (I believe) is healthy and so very easy to follow, and produces tremendous results. More importantly, it is a sustainable way of eating and living for the long term! Doctor Atkins, along with William Banting and countless other low carb legends are responsible for so many people losing weight and attaining improved health and vitality in their lives (including me) - for which I am so tremendously appreciative!!!

It just riles me that some folks out there are under the misconception that the late Doctor Atkins died of heart problems or in any way as a result of his diet - or that are knowingly spreading misinformation about the doctor or the diet program. I know lots of folks have written about this, but I thought I ought to do my part to correct misinformation out there regarding his death and the merits of the way of eating he proposed.

Here are some excellent links for those who might want to read about this online:

USATODAY.com - Atkins wasn't obese, hospital file shows

http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/2004-02-10-atkins_x.htm

Statements on Atkins' death

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2004-02-10-atkins-statements_x.htm

Snopes.com - Death of a Diet Doctor

http://www.snopes.com/medical/doctor/atkins.asp

As I go through my life and see so many enormously obese people - morbidly obese, without hope, in dispair, with lousey and deteriorating health I want to shout from the housetops that there is hope! That this plan works! That *YOU* C-A-N DO THIS!!!!

It is easy!!! EASY!!!! It doesn't have to be an awful struggle or a white-knuckle test of wills. Losing weight and improving your health doesn't have to be a giant endurance test of starvation and desperation! You don't have to be hungry all the time! You don't have to excercise yourself into the ground! There is a way you can lose weight, get healthier, and not suffer or feel so deprived (as you have to do on so many weight loss programs)!

The folks who spread this misinformation - whether they are sincerely misinformed or have an agenda... are potentially affecting the lives of so many folks who can be helped by this way of eating! I hope that the links posted above clear up any questions any reader may have about this... and may be able to open someone's eyes about the tremendous benefit to the Atkins low carb way-of-eating and weight-loss program.

Granted - even if Doctor Atkins was the very picture of health, ...or, even if he was not - the relevance of any single individual is probably not statistically highly relevant in evaluating the efficacy of any of the many ways of eating, dieting, or weight loss. The many, many folks that have consistently lost weight on low carb ways of eating, who have maintained their weight losses over the long term, and the many scientific studies that have concluded that the Atkins and similar low carb diets *ARE* effective - are the real measure of the effectiveness of this program!!

Famous Thoughts: Food, Dieting, and Eating

If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.

J. R. R. Tolkien (1892 - 1973)

His house was perfect, whether you liked food, or sleep, or work, or story-telling, or singing, or just sitting and thinking, best, or a pleasant mixture of them all.

J. R. R. Tolkien (1892 - 1973), The Hobbit

You don't have to cook fancy or complicated masterpieces - just good food from fresh ingredients.

Julia Child (1912 - )

There is no love sincerer than the love of food.

George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950), Man and Superman (1903) act 1

It's amazing how pervasive food is. Every second commercial is for food. Every second TV episode takes place around a meal. In the city, you can't go ten feet without seeing or smelling a restaurant. There are 20 foot high hamburgers up on billboards. I am acutely aware of food, and its omnipresence is astounding.

Adam Scott, The Monkey Chow Diaries, June 2006

The trouble with eating Italian food is that five or six days later you're hungry again.

George Miller

LOVE: A word properly applied to our delight in particular kinds of food; sometimes metaphorically spoken of the favorite objects of all our appetites.

Henry Fielding (1707 - 1754)

Our minds are like our stomachs; they are whetted by the change of their food, and variety supplies both with fresh appetites.

Quintilian

You can tell a lot about a fellow's character by his way of eating jellybeans.

Ronald Reagan (1911 - 2004), quoted in Observer, March 29 1981

If it weren't for Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of television, we'd still be eating frozen radio dinners.

Johnny Carson (1925 - 2005)

Getting my lifelong weight struggle under control has come from a process of treating myself as well as I treat others in every way.

Oprah Winfrey (1954 - ), O Magazine, August 2004

Eating everything you want is not that much fun. When you live a life with no boundaries, there’s less joy. If you can eat anything you want to, what’s the fun in eating anything you want to?

Tom Hanks (1956 - ), Esquire, June 2006

Miserable mortals who, like leaves, at one moment flame with life, eating the produce of the land, and at another moment weakly perish.

Homer (800 BC - 700 BC), The Iliad

Chew before you swallow.

George W. Bush (1946 - ), On TV, about his passing out eating a pretzel

A man of sixty has spent twenty years in bed and over three years in eating.

Arnold Bennett