Atkins: The man who brought bacon to weight loss

Tuesday, April 22, 2003

By LINDA LEE, New York Times News Service

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NEW YORK — There are New Yorkers who would prefer that Mayor Michael Bloomberg legalize smoking in restaurants while making bread-eating illegal. These are not just fashion models but the fanatical followers of the low-carbohydrate theories of Dr. Robert C. Atkins, who died Thursday.

"Does that mean I can have bread now?" one woman asked.

For Atkins advocates, no, it does not.

Dennis Franz, Jennifer Aniston, Stevie Nicks and Al Gore have lost weight on an Atkins diet, eschewing fruits and pasta and loading up on hamburgers, cheese omelets and bernaise-smothered steaks.

But despite followers in Hollywood, the Atkins diet always seemed like a New York diet, partly because Atkins lived and worked in New York, and partly because the competition's book titles, such as "The Zone" and "Sugar Busters!" (both preaching a low-carb philosophy), seem so airily West Coast.

Let Californians talk about raw food. In New York, people talked about ketosis and came to regard a sandwich with horror. In fact, it is hard to remember a time when hosts served bread, pancakes and potatoes without guilt.

Starting about four years ago, in the wake of the publication of "Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution," the Atkins diet spread like a virus among New Yorkers whose antennas are ever tuned to what's new, whether a stiletto heel or a food trend.

"I remember seeing this good friend of mine, Jason Epstein, at Dean & DeLuca, near the European butter section, and Jason was eating out of a huge plastic bag of mixed nuts," recalled Jeffrey Steingarten, a food writer for Vogue. "I said, 'What are you doing?' He must have lost 40 pounds on Atkins."

From prominent book editors like Epstein to fashionistas like Liz Lange to socialites like Samantha Boardman and Alexandra Von Furstenberg, New Yorkers hopped on the Atkins trend.

Anne Hollander, the fashion historian, said the fad for Atkins had something to do with people's rebellion against all that jogging and low-fat austerity preached during the 1980s and early '90s. "Resentment boiled up about not being able to enjoy life," she said. "What's gone out is punishing exercise routines and the idea that you could never eat another strip of bacon."

Thanks to Atkins, who worked out of the Atkins Center for Complementary Medicine in Manhattan, New Yorkers have felt free to go on a bacon binge.

How many have kept the weight off? "It's one of the key diets that everyone in the business has been on at one time and another," said Fern Mallis, executive director of Seventh on Sixth, which organizes Fashion Week in New York. "There was a moment when everyone in my office was on it — bacon and eggs and burgers and salads with blue cheese dressing. They lost weight and their body types changed."

Jill Krementz, the photographer, who is married to Kurt Vonnegut, has the zeal of the recently converted. Since starting an Atkins diet last July, she has lost nearly 40 pounds. "I'm happy to be out of my Gap clothes and back in my old Armanis, which in the interval became vintage Armanis," she said.

She plans to continue with a maintenance form of the diet that allows a few more carbs. But she doesn't mind passing up the bread basket indefinitely. "It's like giving up smoking, giving up bread," she said. "Have a dinner roll, and it's like 'Dead Man Walking.' So I don't plan to eat a roll. Bread begets bread."

The painter Donald Sultan went on the Atkins diet in 1997 and lost 25 pounds in 10 weeks. "I was eating eggs and bacon and meatballs every five seconds," he said. "And lots of mayonnaise. Every food became a vehicle for mayonnaise."

"It was easy to do, though I've put a lot of it back on," he conceded.

The restaurateur Drew Nieporent has battled a tendency toward ballooning weight for years, and he discovered Atkins during the first vogue, after his 1972 book, "Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution," became a best-seller. "I've had many weight losses in my life, and the one I'd attribute to Atkins was almost 29 years ago," Nieporent said. "At the time, the diet that was out was the Stillman diet, but Atkins piggybacked it. Atkins allowed all this fat, cream in your coffee. I lost 80 pounds when I was young. But it wasn't a life-sustaining diet."

Two years ago, he returned to what he calls a "modified Atkins," low carbohydrates but also low fat, and he lost 120 pounds between April 2001 and April 2002. "I'm not on any diet now, except eating sensibly, more of a non-Atkins approach," he said. "You've got to watch the fat. The scale might have nudged up a couple of notches since a year ago, but I still lost 100 pounds overall."

Many Atkins dieters point out the difficulty of adhering to the strict prohibitions. Eat one dinner roll or one order of fusilli with capers, and you've fallen off the wagon. Gary Goldstein, chief executive officer of the Whitney Group, an executive search firm in the financial services industries, said he had done Atkins a number of times. At first it worked fine. "Then I started getting cocky about having a piece of bread," he said. "And one weekend, I swear, I gained 10 pounds from Friday to Monday."

Liz Lange, a designer of maternity wear favored by Manhattan's smart set, tried Atkins four years ago, losing a total of 8 pounds during dieting bursts over six months. "You start to feel leaner and your clothes start to feel better and that's great," she said. "But I could never go back. It seems impossible. I'd rather do anything else. It was too hard."

She was excited at first to shop for prosciutto and cheese. "And then after a few days I was craving a simple bowl of pasta," she said. "And I was just so sick of steaks and cheese omelets that I was too sick to eat. I mean, I remember looking in my refrigerator at rare roast beef slices and feeling sick."

She also suspects that by depriving herself of all carbohydrates, she created a permanent longing for them. Now she is a "carboholic," she said. "I liked cake fine before — in fact, I thought I didn't really care about cake and pasta and bagels, but ever since that diet I'm a cake freak. I think about potatoes and French fries and soft mushy cakes and crave them."

Glenn O'Brien, a writer who once worked for Andy Warhol and who writes a style column for GQ, said he had lost some weight but could not do Atkins anymore. "I have to eat carbohydrates in the morning," he said. "And if I could only eat bacon, I would just kill someone."

What's next for the trend-hungry on the diet front?

Atkins is gone, but chubby people still need to get into their bathing suits in two months. O'Brien thinks he knows how.

"Years ago, when I wrote about music, I went on tour with ZZ Top, and Billy Gibbons lost a lot of weight by eating half of everything," O'Brien said. "He would get his dinner and eat half. Open a can of beer and have half. That was what I did the last time I lost weight."

Let's call it the ZZ Half Diet.