Companies that seek to grow fat by selling fad-diet foods may falter and fail but the diets themselves never die. You may have noticed that Atkins Nutritionals recently filed for bankruptcy protection. And you also likely knew that the Atkins Diet in its simplest form said eat meat and avoid bread. (Unless it was their own very expensive low-carb bread.)

There are not many fields in which I shine but I am a first magnitude star in dieting. Three times in my life I have sloughed off substantial poundage — twice on regular diets and once by sheer dumb luck.

The regular diets were, I must confess, the low-calorie kind in which you rise early from the table and are always hungry. Scant bread, little sugar, no fat, a helping of meat no bigger than a poker chip — and don’t even think of opening the refrigerator. I managed to stick to a low-calorie diet twice in 10 years and I lost probably a total of 80 pounds.
My secret was that I had a goal; at the end of the diet tunnel was a table laden with bacon and eggs and spare ribs, bread slathered with butter and chocolate éclairs. Twice I lost weight. Twice I rewarded myself with food, and twice I put most of those pounds back on.

But always I fought the good dieting fight. I tried an early version of the Atkins and ate nothing but steak for the main course, pâté for dessert and snacks of bacon and cold pork chops. I avoided bread, vegetables and fruit and at the end of the week I had lost a couple of pounds and smelled like the lions’ cage at the zoo. (And perhaps I also turned purple.)

So I ditched that diet and tried one based on bran. Pretty much eating normal foods save for ice cream, and stirring spoonfuls of bran into all possible meals. The chief drawback of this diet (outside of the fact that bran tastes like sawdust) was that one always had to be close to a bathroom. So I returned to normal eating except that every couple of months
I would go on the miracle soup diet. On this one all you ate was the soup. As much as you wanted. The recipe was simple: lots of vegetables in broth with powdered onion soup mix for flavour and heavy on the cabbage. It was very good the first day, adequate the second, daunting the third and by day four you started to think of yourself as a ruminant and your stomach could be heard churning at 100 yards. (Oh, and it was a good idea to stay close to a bathroom.)

But the very best diet of all was the dumb luck diet.

One winter’s day more than 20 years ago, I flew back overnight from the west coast to
Toronto and arrived feeling hungry. But I was diet-conscious so I found a tin of sliced pineapple and a half-full container of cottage cheese and ate a healthy snack. Then my stomach started to hurt. And hurt some more. As the day wore on, I wore out and finally we called a couple of friends who were doctors.

When they saw that my temperature was elevated, my skin clammy and my conversation down to mumbled grunts and moans, they drove me to the hospital where the surgeons sliced me open, dug out a totally ruptured appendix, poured some antibiotics into the gaping hole and shunted me off to Intensive Care. (No they didn’t sew up the trench in my abdomen; likely they didn’t have enough thread.)

Surprisingly, I lived through Intensive Care and, after three or four days, awoke in a bed in a semi-private room with tubes running out of all orifices. But the nurse said a bit of exercise would do me good so she set me on my feet and I tottered out into the hall, pushing a hatrack of tubes and pouches. And there, wonderful to behold, only a few feet from me was a scale. I sloshed over and climbed on and found it was calibrated in joules or kilograms but no matter. I read out what the scale said — something like 79 kilos — then I collapsed back on my bed and started doing the math with the help of my nurse.

@page_break@And when I got the result I was elated: I had lost eighteen pounds. Eighteen pounds in less than a week. Miracle weight loss almost overnight. What a splendid diet. Indeed, a diet to die for. Or nearly. IE