Dr Atkin's Diet Revolution!

A chap I knew had recently turned himself from a conspicuous lardy into a fairly trim young man. So I asked him how he'd done it.

He looked rather sheepish and mumbled something about 'Atkins Diet'. He described how the thing was to give up all carbohydrates. Apparently he'd spent a few months craving potatoes while the weight came off but it was all fairly easy. I decided to look this up on the web.

It turns out that the general opinion on dieting is pretty much summed up by the Dilbert cartoon where the pointy-haired boss is trying to choose diets, and says "should I go on the one that will kill me, or the one that will make me miserable, but won't work?"

It does seem to be agreed that the Atkins diet works, but no-one's entirely sure why, and everyone's convinced that giving up carbohydrates entirely and just living on protein and fat has to be horribly bad for you in some way. And for some people the Atkins diet doesn't seem to work at all.

But it did prompt a whole new raft of investigation into why it works.