then the future came and took my dreams away

Back when my ex was way fat, and trying to get buff for all sorts of complicated reasons, he decided the way to do it, without expending any effort at all, was via The Atkins Plan. Because on the Atkins Plan, you could eat bacon, and butter, and bacon fried in butter, and bacon fried in butter with pats of butter on top, and steak and butter-fried steak, and you know, so on. Also, so forth.

And he lost weight. I am not entirely sure how he lost weight, because he was eating entire packages of bacon, and deep-fried butter on sticks, and his eschewing of vegetables as prescribed by crazy not-right-thinking Dr. “Crazy not-right-thinking” Atkins was a thing of beauty to behold in its stringent adhered-ness.

I can see the benefit of being careful with carbs – you know, refined sugar and white bread and things that are probably not so great for you. But the strict crazy not-right-thinking kind of Atkins that my ex was following was just – well, you know. See above, re: crazy and not-right thinking.

But again – he lost weight. And I thought, oh my god. I want to eat bacon and lose weight. Because bacon! Bacon, for Christ sake. Any diet that includes bacon is the kind of diet that I’m going to jump both-footed into.

We didn’t do it in any sane and rational way, either. We could have stuck with skim milk and lean protein, but no – no, we started eating eggs scrambled with pure creamery cream and fried in butter and eating steak and sausage and all sorts of noxious things, which was kind of awesome for awhile. Because have I mentioned the bacon? And oh my god – the cheese. The beautiful, beautiful cheese. And you know how fat tastes good. Goddamn, does it taste good.

I theorized that the point of the full-fledged Atkins (theorized, because I wasn’t actually going to sit down and read the book, which was painfully written and poorly printed) was that fat is satisfying and you would not eat as much full-fat stuff as you would its poor low-fat cousin.

That theory was blown all to hell by the way he ate. And it was blown all to hell by the way I enjoyed omelets with way more eggs than I am willing to admit in a public space and handfuls of cheeses.

But somehow, after a month, I had dropped twelve pounds, except I was feeling gross. Really gross. Kind of oily, and like I was going “squish squish squish” as I walked. Squish. I felt greasy, and I knew if the house didn’t stop stinking like grease, I was going to burn it down (“Whoops! Must have been a grease fire! Hahahaha! Sorry.”).

There is some point in Atkins where you stop being so strict about vegetables, but I stopped before that point. He, however, kept on going. As far as I know, he is now skinny and dead of a heart attack. Or not. I’m not really sure.

But I do know, that I was sitting in the House of Prime Rib with my visiting relatives, one of whom does not eat anything but mashed potatoes from a box, spaghetti with “tomato sauce, not ‘marinara or whatever’” and steak, and looking at the House of Prime Rib menu and realizing there was nothing - no, really, nothing, I’m serious – on the menu that in any way conformed to any rational weight watchers kind of plan, this menu with only steak fried in butter and creamed spinach, I took small and possibly ironic comfort in the fact that if I were on Atkins, I would be so goddamn on plan I should get some kind of goddamn medal.

This entry was posted by anne, on Thursday, January 13, 2005. You can leave your response.