RE: Experiences with Atkins diet

From: Emlyn O'regan (oregan.emlyn@healthsolve.com.au)
Date: Sun Apr 27 2003 - 17:38:29 MDT

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    Hal Finney wrote:
    > I thought I'd write about my own experiences with the Atkins diet.
    > I've been on it almost two weeks. Coincidentally I began just a few
    > days after Greg Burch's post about it, although I had decided
    > to try it
    > a few days earlier after a friend told me about his success
    > with the diet.
    (snip)

    It's one of those strange coincidences... I just started Atkins on the 25th,
    and only just saw these messages today. I'll describe my experience so far,
    including a wrinkle which I didn't expect...

    I'll begin by saying that I've never been on a diet in my life, and haven't
    needed to. Arguably I probably still don't need to, but I am starting to
    noticably gain a little weight, so I've been wondering about it for a while.
    Then my wife started this diet last week, and wanted some support, so I
    thought "hey, how bad can it be"?

    Good and bad, actually. I'm firmly in the induction period (2 weeks
    basically of meat, eggs, and some salad and vegies, and pretty much nothing
    else). I've been on an almost vegetarian diet, mostly because my
    mother-in-law, who lives with us, is vegetarian, so it's easier. I've never
    really eaten a lot of meat anyway, even as a kid.

    Suddenly, I'm the monster of meat. This is a really counterintuitive diet,
    all about fat. btw, someone recently said that it isn't necessary to eat
    lots of fat on the Atkins diet; actually, it is. In his book, he
    specifically recommends against diet products, not only because they often
    contain sugar (which is outlawed), but because not consuming enough fat will
    cause this diet to not work.

    I have had really bad sugar cravings. My house is full of fresh fruit and
    chocolate and lollies (kids & easter will do that). It's pretty hard. But
    I've coped with that by consuming a fair amount of saccarin sweetened stuff,
    and pretending it's sugar (grimace).

    The real kicker though, has been a totally unexpected one.

    A constant in my life since I had my first child (7 years ago) has been
    coffee... well, caffeine addiction, actually. I drink vast amounts of strong
    brewed coffee, go through patches of regular headaches, long term increased
    anxiety, tension. Nasty stuff. But it is really hard to break the habit;
    just to cut down I usually reduce my intake by 1 cup per week, which is slow
    enough to not bring on caffeine withdrawal headaches.

    Now this is a problem with Atkins, because apparently caffeine messes with
    blood sugar levels; you aren't supposed to drink any coffee. I though I'd
    pretty much have to ignore this; cut it down a little, but really there's no
    way I could cut it out just like that, is there?

    On the *second* day, I drank 1 cup of coffee all day, and felt fine. I
    didn't want any more. I was really worried that this was a time bomb waiting
    to go off, but the idea of coffee grossed me out.

    Yesterday, I drank 2 cups, the second one only because I went to a party
    where I couldn't drink the champagne :-( sugar.

    Today, I'm writing this in the morning, I've had no coffee. None! I might go
    make a decaf now, basically my morning coffee is a ritual that I've missed
    this morning and feel like catching up on. But caffeine dependency... where
    the hell did it go???

    I've always had sugar in my coffee, and I'm wondering whether this could all
    be about blood sugar/insulin? Coffee with two sugars is probably a nightmare
    for that; now that things are supposedly stabilised (though I feel weird as
    all crap), I just don't want it.

    Certainly I noticed some time ago that my impending headaches could
    sometimes be stopped via massive consumption of fatty foods (KFC, better
    than ibuprofen!).

    One other thing; my wife has been having a really hard time on this diet;
    she says she feels like she did when she was morning sick, which can't be
    good. Apparently some people do have a bad reaction to it. As for me, well I
    feel weird, not bad not good but strange. Losing coffee is a giant plus,
    though, so I'll stick induction out if only for that. The real test will be
    to see if I can stay off coffee; as a programmer, who needs to be able to
    concentrate in that particularly singular way demanded by long coding
    stretches, I have depended on coffee as a stimulant. So I've quit it before,
    but ended up going back to it. But we'll see...

    Emlyn
    (You know, the body is a complex and mysterious thing. Somedays the
    transhuman vision seems truly difficult to realise).



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