Reid About It

Well, logic has returned to life. No longer will I have to hear people with bad breath tell me how simply eating bacon can make me live longer. The Atkins Diet is officially dead.

At one point, the Atkins revolution was everywhere, just one step short of becoming the new Scientology. Anyone who dared point out the natural fallacy of thinking you could lose weight by eating nothing but sausage and meatloaf was shouted down.

"This is the new way," they'd bellow, and scarf down a triple-hamburger with no bun. "The face of proper nutrition has been changed forever," they would proclaim while eating a dozen eggs and eliminating all fresh fruit from their houses. "That old way of diet is old and outdated," they'd summarize as the smell of death wafted from their mouths, and they ran to the toilet to rid themselves of enough meaty remains to render a submarine uninhabitable.

Calling this diet the "Atkins craze" was a perfect description of it. The disciples were so sucked in by the prospect of eating semi-normally and still losing weight, they became completely irrational. Giving up fruit, pasta, and bread in favor of eating like a Puma, and expecting the weight to just fall off of your body is not logical.

You want to lose weight, you eat less and exercise. You do not eat fast food burgers without the bun, and pretend you're eating Soylent Green.

There were immediate results, as people did lose weight briefly. So what? Crystal Meth is an excellent diet aid if you're willing to take it long enough to rot out your teeth. You don't see a lot of fat guys on Cops, do you?

I'm not sure if Jim Jones included nutritional guidelines in his plan to bring his followers to Jonestown, but it wouldn't surprise me if he told them the way to heaven was lined with pork chops. They would have lined up and drank the Kool-Aid happily.