My Second Attempt at the Atkins Diet

I was NOT in charge of my inner state!

Making low carb work takes determination and focus, but also the support of family and friends. When I tried the Atkins Diet for the second time, I had neither. The diet had evolved a bit and I had recently been diagnosed with pre-diabetes.

There is no nice way to say this.

My ex wanted to keep me fat. Oh, and break me, whatever that means.

I didn't know that at the time. He wouldn't admit that's what he was doing until decades later, just before he ran off with someone he met over the internet.

Things went from bad to worse after my first son was born. And as weeks turned into months and months turned into years, all I could do was helplessly watch as life grew into a daily nightmare, a downward spiral filled with mental, emotional, and physical abuse.

It's true that how we respond to the events in our lives matters. Looking back now, I can see the mechanicalness of it all. There wasn't much responding.

Or thinking.

Or living.

When you're drowning in apathy, fear, anger, and resentment, most of what you say and do is pure reaction.

I lived by what I thought was intuition and raised my four sons to be stronger than I was. But I didn't realize that I wasn't living by intuition at all. It was just conditioning.

I was a wooden puppet, going through the same motions, over and over, whenever someone else pulled the strings. I was not in charge of my emotional state.

Who and what I was did not exist.

Perspective is often an imaginary world
we have created to live in.

I used to dream that I was in a wheelchair, searching for a garden. A wheelchair that my ex would slam me back into whenever I tried to stand up.

At the time, I thought the garden was being thin. I believed that if I could just get thin, the nightmare would go away. I would be acceptable to others then.

If I was thin, everything wrong in my life would suddenly become right.

And good.

And worthwhile.

What I didn't understand was that the truth of what we are lies in what we do, and not what we say.

Somehow, I managed to survive long enough to find myself in another doctor's office, enduring a stern lecture about how I'd let myself go, and the dangers of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes.

My life was suddenly going to take a hard jerk to the right. I was going to get what I wanted.

But first, I had to experience Atkins 92.

[This is part 3 of a multi-part series that reveals How I Lost Over 100 Pounds Tweaking the Atkins Diet. If you didn't read part 1, click on the above link. There, you'll find links to all of the parts of my story, as they become available.]

Our Dieting Experiences Become a Part of Us

Until I wrote the above introduction to this third post in the How I Lost Over 100 Pounds Tweaking the Atkins Diet series, I didn't realize how much I had personally evolved right along with the Atkins movement.

Being educated in its very beginnings, its purpose and method, and watching Atkins grow into something else entirely was more of a blessing than I realized. The path gave me the ability to see what worked and what didn't without having to live through every one of those lessons myself.

Many personal beliefs actually came from others,
and then get distorted again as you pass them on.

The lessons we learn from what we pass through on a day-to-day basis become a part of us, even if we don't realize they are there. We absorb the beliefs of others and easily make them our own if we are not on guard.

For example, in the mid 80s, mom paid to send me to Weight Watchers. My younger sister was a member and having good results, so mom believed that Weight Watchers had a secret combination of foods that worked, rather than just a well-balanced diet reduced in calories.

“You have to eat everything,” she said. “Or it won't work.”

Mom was size 1 or 2, had never dieted, so she was only repeating what my sister probably told her, which my sister probably picked up from one of her Weight Watchers leaders.

Like that game we used to play as kids called “Telephone,” beliefs get passed around and distorted and reinforced so many times that we forget that they started out as only possibilities. Not fact.

Despite the fact that the Weight Watchers Exchange Program was about 120 carbs a day, it worked really, really well for me.

Better than I expected.

Slower than Atkins 72 had, of course, and there were days when I was really, really hungry, due to my food choices, but weight loss wasn't hampered by my insulin level at all. The exchange plan worked just as well as a low-carb diet did, especially when you compare it to the results I got when doing Atkins 92.

Weight Watchers Exchange Plan worked as
well as Atkins 92 did for me.

In the 80s, the Weight Watchers Diet only differed in the amount you ate, by gender. Calories for women came to around 1500. No matter how small you were, or how old you were, you always ate 1500 calories.

Despite the fact that the exchange program was lower in carbs than other low-calorie diets, eventually, the body managed to create equilibrium and brought those 1500 calories into balance with the energy you are using during the day.

At that time, you hit a plateau.

This plateau is permanent, if you don't go out on a limb and tweak the diet to keep yourself losing.

For me, that weight-loss plateau manifested at 160 pounds. That's when my Leptin level tanked, and I started to show signs and symptoms of starvation mode.

I didn't know that's what was going on at the time.

I didn't know the body was defending its fat stores and was trying to get me to replenish them. If I'd been wiser and a bit more snake-like, I could have switched from Weight Watchers to Atkins 84 without my ex even noticing. 

The old Weight Watchers program wasn't a carb fest as a lot of popular low-carb bloggers like to paint it, but it never occurred to me to just switch and keep my mouth shut. Instead, I got frustrated when I couldn't force my body to do what I wanted it to do, and when it wouldn't obey:

I quit!

Dieting was just dieting to me. It wasn't a lifestyle. I saw diets as a method to get what I wanted, something that could correct all of the injustices in my life.

I was always either on a diet, or I wasn't.

When off, I pigged out on carbs.

When on, I ate whatever the plan told me to eat. I never deviated. I always followed the rules. I never tweaked anything. How could I?

I had already given my personal power away to the author of whatever plan I was following.

At one point in my quest for thinness, I answered an ad in the back of a woman's magazine for a homemade booklet that promised to share with me – for $9.99 – the secret to long-term weight loss.

When the book arrived, I sat down and eagerly devoured it. I thought the author knew something I didn't. When I finished reading, I had a good laugh.

The joke was on me.

The book simply told me to limit my diet to 60 grams of carbohydrate a day, and the rolls of fat would fall off me.

There was no talk about ketosis or any explanation for why the 60-carb diet worked because the author didn't know anything about all of that. There was just loads of testimonies to the diet's effectiveness. As a reader, I was expected to take the author at his word.

Like the other low-carb diets I'd tried, my ex turned up his nose at the news, and within a few days, the booklet disappeared. I never saw it again, even when the bank foreclosed on our second house and we packed up and moved to a new area.

How I Got Diagnosed with Pre-Diabetes

Getting diagnosed with
pre-diabetes allowed me
to go back to Atkins.

In the fall of 1999, I went to work for a group home that cared for developmentally disabled adults. Part of the hiring process required me to have a physical.

At the physical, the doctor said my thyroid was enlarged and that I needed to see my personal doctor right away.

I didn't have a personal doctor because we were new to the area, so I simply picked the one that was closest to us. I needed to find a new doctor anyway, since I have asthma.

It turned out the doctor I picked specialized in diabetes, which is why he was so upset at what I looked like.

“WHO told you your thyroid was enlarged?” he asked, feeling my neck and not really feeling anything out of the ordinary. “Thyroid meds won't help you lose weight.”

When I told him it was the physician who gave me a physical for work, he agreed to run a test on my thyroid, but he said that he didn't expect to find anything wrong. What he did expect to find was high cholesterol and maybe diabetes because that was his best guess after looking at me.

During that first visit, he told me to stop eating red meat and focus on chicken breast and vegetables because chicken breast was the healthiest meat there was.

The blood tests he ran came back with mixed results.

Thyroid (TSH) was 4.9 mIU/L, just shy of the 5.0 needed for a diagnosis of hypothyroidism, so he told me my thyroid was fine and refused to treat it. Obviously, it wasn't fine, so something was amiss even then. But, this type of reaction, or non-reaction, is still common today.

Now, I don't have hypothyroidism.

It took me ages to get a proper diagnosis, but thanks to a doctor's assistant who listened to me when I told her about the doctor who told me the thyroid was enlarged, and ran a sonogram on the thyroid, I eventually learned that I have Graves Disease.

I have no idea WHY my TSH was high back then. Today, it is almost non-existent.

Cholesterol tested normal, so the doctor apologized for hammering me at that first visit regarding the potential for heart disease. He was apparently a by-the-book doc, because the total cholesterol number was 199, just barely normal.

However, my fasting blood sugar was a whopping 121 mg/dL, just shy of the 126 mg/dL needed to diagnose me with diabetes. In those days, the A1c test wasn't used for diagnosis, so I have no clue how the high sugars were actually affecting the body.

Since the doctor was concerned about potential diabetes, he freaked out at the results. “You have pre-diabetes!” he said. “You need to up your exercise to 2 hours a day!”

This reaction worked in my favor. After explaining how he wanted me to lose 10 pounds, which would magically cure my pre-diabetes, he dragged my ex into his office, sat him down, and in no uncertain terms, told him that he had two choices:

“You can either buy her the low-carb food she needs and hopefully prevent her going into diabetes, or you can purchase diabetic supplies after she does. Which is it going to be?”

Since money talked, when it came to the ex, he chose to let me go low carb.

Atkins 72 Had Evolved Into Atkins 92

The original Atkins book was totally rewritten in 1992, which offered readers more insight into Dr. Atkins' mindset, beliefs, and professional experience.

Technically, the diet started to evolve in 1984, when Dr. Atkins published nutritional advice for everyone under the title of Dr. Atkins' Nutrition Breakthrough: How to Treat Your Medical Condition Without Drugs, but only a handful of individuals even know that Dr. Atkins wrote several nutrition books.

Not just the ones he's famous for.

The newer book placed more responsibility on the dieter than the prior version did. It offered ways to tweak the diet to fit real life, such as cutting down on carbs during the week so you could indulge in a baked potato over the weekend as one of your carb additions.

With the 1992 version, you were free to either follow Atkins Induction, as written, or create your own low-carb diet by eating anything you wanted, as long as you didn't eat more than 20 total carbs per day for the first two weeks.

Cream cheese, almonds, nut meal, and even protein powder and soy flour were all legal foods on the Induction plan, paving the way for inventive, creative cooks to come up with unique low-carb recipes.

Induction was no longer just meat, eggs, cheese, and lettuce.

Instead of just salad, it now included 2/3 cup vegetables. This raised the number of carbs on Induction from less than 10 to less than 15.

If you opted for your own plan, you could also choose creamed spinach, low-carb casseroles, chicken alfredo, and even pumpkin cheesecake on Induction, as long as you kept a close eye on those carbs and didn't go over 20 for the first two weeks.

Those who went in this direction ate more carbs during those initial days.

This new leniency was designed to make Atkins simpler to fit into your lifestyle and enable you to adapt the diet to what was happening at the time.

But that's not how the low-carb community embraced it.

I had finally hooked up to the Internet in 1999 and saw that the Atkins Diet had a lot of competition. It was no longer the most popular low-carb diet out there.

In addition to all those 60-carb diet booklets that people were tossing together in their garage, the original Protein Power book hit the shelves in 1996.

Many Atkins dieters purchased Dr. Eades book, claiming that Protein Power included the science behind a low-carb diet that Dr. Atkins didn't share in his books.

In rebuttal, Dr. Atkins clearly stated that his books were accurate, as far as the science went, but people flocked to the Protein Power explanations for why low carb worked, anyway.

They didn't stop doing Atkins.

They just bought into the Insulin Hypothesis and the ideas Dr. Eades presented on what he believed our ancestors ate.

It was Dr. Eades who first presented the low-carb community with the idea that fiber didn't need to be counted because it wasn't metabolically active.

The Truth About Fiber

There are two main types of fiber: soluble and insoluble.

Soluble fiber dissolves in water, while insoluble fiber does not.

Soluble fiber comes from plant cells and turns into a gel-like substance that binds to bile acids and carries them out of the body. Since the liver converts cholesterol into bile acids, eating plenty of soluble fiber will help keep your cholesterol levels in check.

Along with absorption of water, which helps you to feel full and slows down transit time, bacteria in the colon degrades these fiber molecules by fermentation.

A large portion of the cellulose and most of the pectin that finds its way into the colon is broken down into short-chain fatty acids and then used by the body as fat.

These fatty acids can either be absorbed by the body or used to nourish the lining of the colon, so while you don't physically digest soluble fiber, the bacteria in your colon does, and the end product provides energy, calories, and nutritional value that contribute to your daily energy intake.

Insoluble fiber, on the other hand, is not broken down in the colon and simply passes out of the body still unchanged. It does provide bulk, but absolutely no nutritional value, so when people talk about fiber not being relevant, this is the type of fiber they're talking about.

Dr. Atkins Perspective on Fiber

In 1998, the 1992 version of the Atkins Diet was republished in hardback only. There was one single change made in this new volume, a small comment on fiber where Dr. Atkins attempted to separate soluble fiber from insoluble fiber.

He stated that he saw nothing wrong with the idea of subtracting the carbohydrate count for insoluble fiber from your daily total carb count.

Shortly after the new book hit the market, those on the John Hopkins Atkins board who were in direct contact with Dr. Atkins asked him if the low-carb dieters on the list needed to go out and purchase his new book.

“No,” Atkins said. “The only new concept in the whole book is my statement on fiber. I see nothing wrong with the idea of subtracting insoluble fiber from your total carbohydrate count.”

Notice how he didn't say anything about subtracting soluble fiber, the fiber you get in vegetables or the psyllium husks he recommended that you use daily. He only mentioned insoluble fiber being an acceptable deduction.

However, in the 72 and 92 versions of the diet, psyllium husks were not counted toward your daily carb total.

But the low-carb community didn't understand.

They were looking to Dr. Atkins to give them permission to deduct all forms of fiber in the carbs they were eating, like those on the Protein Power diet got to do, so that's what they heard.

They didn't hear what Dr. Atkins actually said.

Although those who personally spoke to Atkins did their best to clarify, no one listened to them.

Net carbs gave dieters the false reality of being able to eat more carbs, and that's what the low-carb community as a whole actually wanted to do.

This was the first clue that trouble was brewing beneath the surface, but in 1999, the direction the Atkins Diet would travel was impossible to see.

What the Internet Did for the Low-Carb Movement

One of the downsides to Atkins 72 was the exclusive nature of the diet, given the fact that the internet did not exist yet.

Unless you already came equipped with a creative spirit and love for cooking that enabled you to adapt the rules of the Atkins Diet to fit your lifestyle, the diet was extremely limited and stayed that way, even on maintenance.

However, by 1999, people online were shockingly creative.

Given the laxness of the new version, they easily came up with low-carb recipes and ideas I never would have thought of myself – like cutting American cheese into tiny little squares, placing them on parchment paper, and magically turning them into crunchy crackers by nuking them in the microwave for a minute.

People made pizza using ground meat as the crust or whipped up a batch of pancakes or waffles using soy flour or Atkins bake mix.

In fact, many of the popular recipes today originated from those doing Atkins in 1999. They did not come from today's popular bloggers.

Today's One-Minute Muffin made with flaxmeal or almond meal was the recipe originally used to make pancakes and waffles with soy flour.

Some of these recipes were great, but many of them flat-out sucked.

Cauliflower salad does not taste like potato salad, and cauliflower rice does not taste like rice. No matter how hard you try to spin it, those white morsels still taste like partially cooked cauliflower.

Low-carb bread, made with mostly vital wheat gluten, was spongy and barely edible.

This is one of the reasons why you won't find recipes for those types of dishes in our recipe archives. Recipes here on the site are what I either used to eat or still eat today.

But I do understand how those dieters felt.

They were just happy to have some kind of replacement for the potatoes, rice, pasta, and desserts they were missing. And fancy, faux low-carb recipes helped them feel more normal and included.

Plus, the longer they were low carb, the more tolerable the substitutes became because they forgot what the original starchy version tasted like.

Overall, the low-carb lifestyle has vastly improved.

It became a collective adventure.

With no such thing as content marketing, except for those who decided to create low-carb companies or sell low-carb cookbooks, people openly shared and gave away their cooking secrets for free, with no strings attached.

There was no, "if you want the recipe, you'll have to buy my book," going on.

Sugar substitutes tasted better, making it possible to enjoy an occasional strawberry cheesecake or scoop of low-carb ice cream without blowing your carb budget.

As for me?

I didn't have the money to spend on several heads of cauliflower every week. Nor, could I afford the steaks, shrimp, almond flour, and boneless chicken breasts that these creative low-carb cooks were using on a daily basis.

I didn't drink protein shakes or use protein powder as a flour substitute in 1999.

But eggs and chicken leg quarters were cheap, pork chops were still affordable, and with four teenage sons, there was always hamburger patties in the house.

Preparing for Atkins 92

The prevailing advice in 1999 was to gut your house of high-carb junk.

Period.

Get rid of all the temptation, so you don't have to deal with the voices in your head trying to coax you to eat it. While that might work for those who live alone, it definitely wasn't going to work for me.

Instead, I cleared off a shelf in the pantry for a handful of specialized foods. I didn't need much room because I was already on a whole foods diet, due to a number of food and chemical sensitivities I had.

I preferred frozen vegetables over canned, anyway, and in 1999, I didn't drink coffee.

I did not rush into the plan.

Although, I still had Atkins 72 firmly rooted in my mind, I took the time to reread both the Atkins 72 book and Dr. Atkins' Nutrition Breakthrough.

I read a lot of posts by people following Atkins 92, watched how they were implementing the diet, and how well what they were doing was working for them.

Those who stayed within Old-School Atkins did well.
Those who traveled outside the boundaries, did not.

Those who stayed true to Dr. Atkins original principles and nutritional recommendations of making Atkins a meat-and-vegetable diet did well.

Those who bent the rules or tried to stretch them as far as they could, without actually breaking them, did not.

From a distance, it was fairly easy to see why those chasing after low-carb recipes filled with heavy cream and cheese were not losing as much weight as others.

It was because heavy cream, cheese, nuts, and other low-carb foods are very high in calories, creating a smaller deficit than those of us who used these high-fat ingredients only occasionally to make low carb livable and fit into our lifestyles.

Sweeteners were problematic.

When I first went on Atkins 92, aspartame was not a "thing," so most of us used a teaspoon or two of real sugar, here and there, and counted it as double carbs.

When aspartame hit the market, people began making more desserts and sweets. Before then, desserts were not popular within the low-carb community because sugar alternatives tasted pretty awful.

How Quickly Did I Lose Weight on Atkins 92 Induction?

After watching how well people did trying to create their own Induction plan, I opted for Dr. Atkins' advice instead.

As a result, I lost 8 pounds on Induction, which was only slightly less than the 10 pounds I lost the first two weeks doing Atkins 72.

Since this new Induction plan included 2/3 cup of vegetables per day, in addition to the salad, I wasn't surprised by the slightly slower results.

In 1984, Atkins said his diet was less than 10 grams if you didn't eat any vegetables at all. It was 10 to 15 grams with the salad, and 20 grams with both the salad and vegetables.

The ketone testing strips were moderately high, rather than super heavy, which indicated that the body was more adept at using ketones than when I first followed the diet in 1975, but it was still tossing ketones away freely.

I did NOT move up the Atkins levels, week by week, as instructed.

I stayed at 20 carbs a day for 2 months because after I completed Induction, I went into a lengthy stall.

This was my first experience with the after-Induction water-retention condition that is so common today.

Since it was not my first famine situation, as far as the body was concerned, and I'd reached goal before fat-adaption the first time around, the body simply waited for the famine to be over.

That was the only pattern it knew.

It had to keep using body fat, since I wasn't eating enough dietary fat to supply all the body's needs, but the body had the option of stuffing water into the fat cells instead of shrinking them. So, that is what it was doing.

I wasn't the only one.

Many of the second and third-timers were going through the exact same thing, which is one of the main reasons why I'm showing you how I arrived at Atkins in 2007 before sharing the details of exactly what I did to lose over 100 pounds.

It was helpful for me to watch others.

At exactly 6 weeks after Induction – around the eight week mark – these individuals retaining water experienced a sudden nose-dive on the scale due to the body releasing all of that stored water.

The same thing happened to me at eight weeks in. Almost overnight, I dropped 12 pounds for a total of 20 pounds in eight weeks doing exactly what I did for Induction in 1975 – except for the additional vegetables, of course.

The new vegetable list wasn't anywhere near as extensive as it was in 2002, and since I don't have access to that 92 list right now, this is the vegetable list Dr. Atkins gave in 1984 when he first offered readers the vegetable option.

I'm pretty sure this is similar to the 1992 list because I can remember eating most of these things:

sauerkraut
asparagus
broccoli
green beans
cabbage
eggplant
mushrooms
tomatoes
onions
spinach
peppers
summer squash
pumpkin
turnips
avocado
bamboo shoots
bean sprouts
water chestnuts
snow pea pods

My ex really, really liked boneless pork ribs and sauerkraut, so we ate that a LOT. He was too busy stuffing his face to pay attention to what I was eating.

I drank homemade, hot chocolate every morning.

Breakfast for me was a sugar-free hot cocoa, which I made using:

• 1 tablespoon Hershey's unsweetened cocoa powder
• 2 tablespoons heavy cream
• hot water to fill the cup
• sweetener to taste

Sometimes, I'd eat a couple of deviled eggs with it, and sometimes, I wasn't hungry, so I didn't eat anything at all.

On the days I worked, I normally worked the afternoon and evening shift at the group home, so I'd bake me a chicken leg quarter and have some frozen broccoli or canned green beans for lunch with it before I left. I would then pack a low-carb dinner and take it with me. Mostly salads or leftovers from the weekend.

I often shredded cabbage and used that instead of noodles for a tasty stir-fry.

Some days, when I had more time, I might whip up a green chili and cheese omelet or make an egg wrap by simply beating an egg and cooking it up in a hot buttered skillet like a crepe. I tried to fry the crepes for tacos once, but they just tasted like burned eggs.

Returning carbs to the diet was simple because like Atkins 72, you could eat whatever you wanted in 1999, raising your carbs 5 carbs per day per week, as long as you were getting the results you wanted.

Since grocery funds were limited, I mostly stuck to a protein-and-vegetable diet, using the vegetables from the above list, and only occasionally indulged in cheesecake, pork rinds, strawberries, or sugar-free Breyers ice cream.

We had a huge backyard, so I was able to grow most of the vegetables I ate myself.

That sugar-free ice cream was really hard to keep in the house, however, as my sons LOVED it, so it would often disappear when I was at work!

By the following February, I was down 40 pounds, but I don't really remember how far I still had to go. My memory is blurry. I do remember the ex taking me out for our anniversary on the 21st, and after dinner, in front of everyone there, he loudly announced that he was leaving me for someone else.

One of the biggest lessons in my life is that how you handle the challenges that arise from time to time makes all the difference, and the same goes for hanging onto those fat losses.

Part 4: How to Hang Onto Your Weight Loss When Challenges Arise (Life never stands still for very long, so when my now ex ran off with someone he met over the internet, I moved to maintenance. This post explains what I did and how well it worked.)