This has been my experience, at least, particularly since researching and writing Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease. For me, it all began in the summer of 1999, when I interviewed a professor at MIT who said he’d lost and kept off 40 pounds by eating a high-fat diet—the Atkins diet, as it’s commonly known. Since this professor seemed like a reasonably thoughtful guy, absent of any obvious self-destructive tendencies, I decided to try the same as an experiment. I gave up bread, potatoes, rice, pasta, cereals, pastries, sodas, and beer. Instead, I ate to my appetite’s content mostly high-fat, cholesterol-laden foods that are supposed to kill us (if not sooner, then certainly later)—bacon and sausages for breakfast and meat, fish, or fowl at every other meal. I ordered bacon cheeseburgers for lunch and ate them without the bun. MORE: 7 Classic Carb-Heavy Dinners Made Lighter I became a devotee of butter sauces; cheese plates replaced bread pudding and rhubarb pie for dessert. I rarely left the table hungry, because I ate enormous portions, as I always had; I just didn’t eat carbohydrates. My regimen pleased my wife, who now felt she could enjoy her own meals at a leisurely pace without the threat that I would reach for her mashed potatoes before she did. I dropped pounds effortlessly and stopped exercising regularly, because my weight was now dropping without it. I felt exceptionally well, and because I’m a science journalist with an investigative bent, I spent the years that followed trying to understand the many implications of a diet that allowed me to eat copious quantities of food, but made me much leaner nonetheless. Aside from its many benefits, I’ve learned there are indeed some side effects to this dietary regimen—primarily social and marital ones. First of all, gone are the days that my wife and I will be invited over for a simple meal—the “let me put some spaghetti on the stove with a nice sauce” type of thing. (Friends who are exceedingly fond of grilling or barbecuing are the exception.) Invitations to dinner parties are offered with trepidation and a “what can you eat?” tone, as though whatever it may be will require a special run to the slaughterhouse. A whiff of resentment hovers in the host’s kitchen, as though my dietary faddishness forced a menu change for everyone else, all of whom now have to eat a thoroughly mediocre leg of lamb when they could have enjoyed the host’s signature buckwheat rigatoni with broccoli rabe and tofu instead. After the main course, I have to deal with the specter of dessert, or rather my desire to abstain. Nobody likes an overt show of moral superiority, and that’s how my abstinence is often perceived. The last time I declined, it happened to be a pie baked by the daughter of the host for his birthday. And so I had not merely passed on dessert, I had rejected a touching symbol of filial love. Before I knew it, I was embroiled in a heated discussion about what my hosts now decided was a particularly American inability to enjoy anything in moderation—be it food, drink, or life. My response that moderation—for me, at least—meant no desserts, failed to warm any hearts other than my own. The fact is, I choose to avoid foods that make me fat, a seemingly reasonable behavior—just as avoiding cigarettes seems like a reliable way to reduce my risk of lung cancer. MORE: As for the marital fallout…well, your spouse may feel pressured to share your diet, or at least to avoid the same foods you do, and so she may feel guilty when she eats french fries in your presence or the bun that comes with her hamburger. Such guilt-inspired eating habits may make your partner look crazier than people think you are: The wife of one carb phobe I know took to soaking her pretzels in water so that the crunch—something in very short supply in carbohydrate-restricted diets—would not alert her husband to the carbo-loading going on in the other room. She also hid her cache of chocolate behind the cat food, insisting later that it was a perfectly natural place to store it and only a paranoid food fanatic would think differently. Perhaps the worst aspect of following a diet that most of your peers consider “a fad” is that you may often feel a compulsion to prove that you’re justified in doing so. This requires not just slimming down but actually living longer and remaining healthier than any of your friends. Because bad luck can be as much a factor here as genes and diet, you’re now in a delicate position, one that will last a lifetime (you hope). On the one hand, the temptation to treat your friends’ medical misfortunes as minor or even major victories is compelling, but you’ll have to keep this secret deeply hidden if you want to continue to enjoy their company. Then, of course, should anything unfortunate happen to you—“even moles in [your] front lawn,” as the New York physician Blake Donaldson, an early proponent of carbohydrate-restricted diets, noted in his 1961 memoirs—everyone will blame it on your diet. This past winter, I was anxious (as I will be next winter) that I would slip on an icy sidewalk, as Dr. Robert Atkins did, and crack my head open, thus prompting some chortling among critics and book reviewers that my fall was actually the result of a fat-induced coronary. Meanwhile, my wife recently insisted that I buy a life insurance policy to minimize the damage of such an occurrence, or the possibility that I’m dead wrong (pun intended) about the consequences of a fat- and meat-rich, carb-free diet. The editor of my book has also requested that if I am to die prematurely—and particularly if it’s from anything even vaguely diet-related—to try to postpone my demise until after the book comes out in paperback. Gary Taubes covers health controversies as an award-winning correspondent for Science magazine. He’s the author of Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease. MORE: 6 Things To Never Say To Someone On A Diet
