Learning something new

[TheEarl]

Just coming off the thread about smoking and the possibility of gaining weight when you quit.

I was interested to learn today that constant eating may be the key to keeping trim. Contrary to popular opinion, reducing your daily calory intake will actually make it harder to lose weight (unless of course you eat like Marlon Brando), since your body will take a reduction in food as announcement that a famine is coming up. It's automatic response is to increase your fat deposits and lower your metabolism to prepare for the lean times ahead.

Conversely, when you eat more (eating 5 small meals instead of three big ones) then it speeds up your metabolism by making your digestive system work constantly, rather than in 3 large clumps. Your body will naturally reduce its fat deposits, expecting good times ahead.

Anyone else learn something new today?

The Earl

 

[Boxlicker101]

Just coming off the thread about smoking and the possibility of gaining weight when you quit.

I was interested to learn today that constant eating may be the key to keeping trim. Contrary to popular opinion, reducing your daily calory intake will actually make it harder to lose weight (unless of course you eat like Marlon Brando), since your body will take a reduction in food as announcement that a famine is coming up. It's automatic response is to increase your fat deposits and lower your metabolism to prepare for the lean times ahead.

Conversely, when you eat more (eating 5 small meals instead of three big ones) then it speeds up your metabolism by making your digestive system work constantly, rather than in 3 large clumps. Your body will naturally reduce its fat deposits, expecting good times ahead.

Anyone else learn something new today?

The Earl

This is a well known fact. The body, which is a stone-age design, stores fat against expected lean times ahead. When you start eating less, it interprets that as lean times and tries to conserve fat through different methods. If you start a diet, the first few pounds go fairly easily but after that, it is more difficult.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Eating less can slow down your metabolism, but there's no truth to the idea that eating more makes your body burn it faster, otherwise there'd be a lot more thin people around.

---dr.M.

 

[TheEarl]

Not technically eating more. Just eating small meals at more regular intervals. It increases the metabolism by constant exercise, rather than just overloading it 5 times a day.

The Earl

 

[dr_mabeuse]

I agree with you here. Grazing all day—eating a lot of small snacks rather than a few big meals—seems to be a better and more efficient way of taking in nutrition, and it can probably help with weight and even reduce the amount of food that’s eaten. I trust you don’t mean that you’d get more exercise because of the chewing you’d do. That’s like the mythology about a stalk of celery requiring more calories to digest than it provides. It just ain’t true. Chewing and digestion require hardly any energy expenditure whatsoever.

There’s an awful lot that isn’t known about human meabolism and weight gain. For instance, the caloric value of food is determined using a device called a bomb calorimeter, which burns food under oxygen pressure and really has nothing in common with the way our bodies work. The success of the Adkins low-carbohydrate diet has cast serious doubts on basic assumptions about caloric intake and weight gain, assumptions which have been the foundation of bariatrics (the study of human weight) since the pioneering work on human metabolism was done in the ‘30’s and ‘40’s. It now looks like we may have been wrong for the past 60 or 70 years and that calories may not be the critical factor.

---dr.M.

 

[TheEarl]

I have seen newspaper reports saying that the Atkins diet only works because you fill up quick if you eat less carbohydrates. However not sure of the veracity of that.

Agree about the bomb calorimeter - stupid piece of equipment. Very useful if you wanted to work out how much heat you get from burning a lump of bread. Crap for working out how much energy the body actually gets from that lump.

The Earl

 

[kellycummings]

I have seen newspaper reports saying that the Atkins diet only works because you fill up quick if you eat less carbohydrates. However not sure of the veracity of that.

The Earl

The Atkins diet works (temporarily by many reports) because carbs turn to sugar which then turns to fat. However,when fat is eaten and digested it simply burns away. It's simple but most doctors didn't believe it for years. Now they do but many think it's a temporary fix at best.
That whole thing about Atkins dying because he was overweight is bullshit too. He hit his head on the pavement and died of the injury. His weight came about after the accident due to fluid injected into him to keep him alive.
I'm not on that diet, I personally believe a balanced diet and exercise is the way to go, but there is certainly validity in Atkins' claim.
Also, yes, several small meals is considered better for weight than 3 big ones. I've known many people who eat like that and they are all rail-thin.

 

[shereads]

Just coming off the thread about smoking and the possibility of gaining weight when you quit.

I was interested to learn today that constant eating may be the key to keeping trim. Contrary to popular opinion, reducing your daily calory intake will actually make it harder to lose weight (unless of course you eat like Marlon Brando), since your body will take a reduction in food as announcement that a famine is coming up. It's automatic response is to increase your fat deposits and lower your metabolism to prepare for the lean times ahead.

Conversely, when you eat more (eating 5 small meals instead of three big ones) then it speeds up your metabolism by making your digestive system work constantly, rather than in 3 large clumps. Your body will naturally reduce its fat deposits, expecting good times ahead.

Anyone else learn something new today?

The Earl

Earl, I can vouch for the truth of this. When I quit smoking over a dozen years ago (after a three-pack-a-day habit left with no time to do anything except light and put out cigarettes) I was so paranoid about gaining weight that I ended up losing 10 pounds during the first year. The only changes I made in my diet were drinking more water than I wanted, and making sure I always had a small snack before I began to feel hungry. I still make it a habit to keep a granola bar or something like that in my purse, so when my car tries to turn into the McDonald's Drive-Thru, I can eat what's on hand and not give in to hunger.

That's one thing Weight Watchers promotes: never let yourself get to the point where you're ravenlously hungry, because that's when a binge will happen. The Food thread started by the wicked Dr. Mabeuse has not been helpful today, btw.

 

[shereads]

The Atkins diet works (temporarily by many reports) because carbs turn to sugar which then turns to fat. However,when fat is eaten and digested it simply burns away. It's simple but most doctors didn't believe it for years. Now they do but many think it's a temporary fix at best.
That whole thing about Atkins dying because he was overweight is bullshit too. He hit his head on the pavement and died of the injury. His weight came about after the accident due to fluid injected into him to keep him alive.
I'm not on that diet, I personally believe a balanced diet and exercise is the way to go, but there is certainly validity in Atkins' claim.
Also, yes, several small meals is considered better for weight than 3 big ones. I've known many people who eat like that and they are all rail-thin.

The people who license the Atkins Diet have altered the advice recently, though; they're recommending a significant reduction in the amount of fat consumed, and the addition of "non-white" carbohydrates. People were losing weight at the risk of liver damage and seriously clogged arteries.

 

[shereads]

Anyone else learn something new today?

Oh, I almost forgot your original question.

Yes, I did. I learned that I look soooo cute in my new shoes, and that it is possible to buy adorable ones on sale that not only have a spiked heel, but don't hurt my feet.

Life is good.

 

[A7inchPhildo]

Here is a bit of info you can chew on. Did you know most people are fat not because of the amount of food but the type of food. The majority of processed foods today contain a product called hydrogenated oils/fats. This product will preserve the food for extended periods of time. The down fall to this product is the human body does not know how to break down this man made oil/fat.
hydrogenated - combined with hydrogen; especially of an unsaturated fatty acid combined with hydrogen

Now the common word for this product is Crisco yes the nice stuff used in Oreo cookies and frosting. Or Trans-fats

Masked under the name Hydrogenated you will find it on almost every product. Naturally the higher in the list of ingredients the more of the quanity in the puduct.

Duh that is what people are sueing Mc Donlads for not disclosing how much Hydrogenated oils are in their products. Same as oreo cookies.

The FDA will soon make it mandatory for the quanity to be disclosed on every container. And at this time they recomend athough almost impossible to stay away from products that contain high amounts of Hydrogenated oils/fats.

The only exception is Peanuts they are chemically listed in the same category but are not processed like crisco.


Here are some links to support what I am saying to you.

http://www.fda.gov/ <---- you will need to search Hydrogenated on the FDA site

http://www.westsubcardiology.com/pages/lipids/Transfats.html

http://www.foodcomm.org.uk/transfats_Oct_03.htm

http://www.gmabrands.com/publicpolicy/docs/Comment.cfm?DocID=552&

 

[shereads]

Here is a bit of info you can chew on. Did you know most people are fat not because of the amount of food but the type of food. The majority of processed foods today contain a product called hydrogenated oils/fats. This product will preserve the food for extended periods of time. The down fall to this product is the human body does not know how to break down this man made oil/fat.
hydrogenated - combined with hydrogen; especially of an unsaturated fatty acid combined with hydrogen

Now the common word for this product is Crisco yes the nice stuff used in Oreo cookies and frosting. Or Trans-fats

Masked under the name Hydrogenated you will find it on almost every product. Naturally the higher in the list of ingredients the more of the quanity in the puduct.

Duh that is what people are sueing Mc Donlads for not disclosing how much Hydrogenated oils are in their products. Same as oreo cookies.

The FDA will soon make it mandatory for the quanity to be disclosed on every container. And at this time they recomend athough almost impossible to stay away from products that contain high amounts of Hydrogenated oils/fats.

The only exception is Peanuts they are chemically listed in the same category but are not processed like crisco.


Here are some links to support what I am saying to you.

http://www.fda.gov/ <---- you will need to search Hydrogenated on the FDA site

http://www.westsubcardiology.com/pages/lipids/Transfats.html

http://www.foodcomm.org.uk/transfats_Oct_03.htm

http://www.gmabrands.com/publicpolicy/docs/Comment.cfm?DocID=552&

Thank you, Phildo.

I could just slap my government and my elementary school when I remember how they made us learn that "food pyramid" (did you have that in the UK?) that showed us how much of each food group we were supposed to eat to be healthy. Bread/potatoes were the big, broad base of the pyramid, with protein at the tiny little point at the top.

Years after they hammered home the point that Wonderbread was good for us, they reshuffled the pyramid and told an entire generation of Americans, "Oops! My bad!"

Do the UK and Europe pay people in their government to tell them what to eat? It certainly seems to have backfired in the U.S. We diet more often and benefit less from our diets than any other nation.

I have a feeling we all instinctively know what it makes sense to eat, and just want someone to tell us that we don't need iceberg lettuce; we need cheese.

 

[kellycummings]

Duh that is what people are sueing Mc Donlads for not disclosing how much Hydrogenated oils are in their products. Same as oreo cookies.

Some of those people trying to sue McD's are 300+ pounds and shouldn't have been anywhere near a big mac, regardless of whether or not they knew how much or what kind of fat was in it. I have no sympathy for them.
I understand that ingredients should be disclosed, but I refuse to believe that you can sue a fast food place when you are as big as some of the ones I've seen that are suing.
And since I'm on the subject, does anyone remember that huge guy on Jerry Springer that couldn't get out of his bed and they had to take off the wall of his house to get him out? I remember he said that people brought him food and he ate something like 3 chickens a day and stuff like that. He should sue the people that brought him food. Damn, instead of chicken, bring the man a salad, what's he going to do? Get up and run after you?
Now, before anyone jumps on me for being mean or insensitive, let me say that I do believe that many people have true medical disorders that make it difficult to control weight and that some truly do want to lose weight. I also have no problem whatsoever with big people. I couldn't care less how big someone is. My problem is when they blame it on something they have no right to blame it on.

 

[A7inchPhildo]

(did you have that in the UK?)

Uh She,


The last time i checked I still live in NE FL thinking Florida is in the USA? Um Yes I moved from Mass. But still in the USA. I have no idea what the UK do as they may or may not have the triangle chart of usless information.



kellycummings,

My problem is when they blame it on something they have no right to blame it on.

Kell for starters I am no where near big so I don't take offense to what you say. I am actually a heath fitness freak so! Whatever?


The key will always be excercise to healthy eating ratio. The truth about Hydrogenated foods is not a hoax nor is it a blame.

It is a real consideration though for any one trying to loose weight. A 16 oz fatty steak is better than 3 oreo cookies because the fat in a steak can at least be digested properly. The hydro(trans fats) do not break down, so they stay in the body much much longer.

 

[kellycummings]

I didn't mean that they blame fats. I meant that they blame McDonalds. NOBODY can tell me that they thought it was healthy to eat there. I've heard a couple of these lawsuits and both have said that the person was under the assumption that the food was healthy. BULLSHIT!!!!!
Also, I didn't mean any comment at all towards you, just in general.

 

[shereads]

Uh She,


The last time i checked I still live in NE FL thinking Florida is in the USA? Um Yes I moved from Mass. But still in the USA. I have no idea what the UK do as they may or may not have the triangle chart of usless information.

I knew that...I was trying to be inclusive and not Americacentric.

I'm turning bi-hemispheric, you know.

On the topic of trans-fatty-things, that's another thing we got duped with: margarine. Made with corn oil so it was supposed to be good for you.

("My people called it 'maize.'")



Even my mom's cardiologist tells her it's better to use a little butter on her toast than margarine. Your body doesn't have a clue what to do with that stuff.

Question: when will geneticists stop cloning chickens and give us something we really want: a gene transplant that creates a craving for lettuce. As bootlicker pointed out, we're programmed to crave the foods that were rare when we were hunter-gatherers.

Gotta go. Just spotted a wounded antelope in the back yard! There's enough fat and protein to get my entire tribe through the next week!

 

[A7inchPhildo]

Your funny,

I do eat meats at times (as long as it is burnt to a black crisp) I just prefer vegtables.

 

[Svenskaflicka]

That's what the WW keep telling us here, too. Stuff yourself with healthy, slim food, like veggies and fruit and potatoes, and only add a little meat and fat ad sauce to enhance the taste. If you eat veggies until you're full, you'll only have a little room left for "bad" food, thus reducing the intake to a pretty harmless amount.

Now, if only buns and sandwiches could be classified as "veggies", I'd be losing weight faster than a snowmen melts in a sauna!

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Here is a bit of info you can chew on. Did you know most people are fat not because of the amount of food but the type of food. The majority of processed foods today contain a product called hydrogenated oils/fats. This product will preserve the food for extended periods of time. The down fall to this product is the human body does not know how to break down this man made oil/fat.

Okay. I checked your FDA site and didn't see anything about this, because it's just not true.

Most animal fats are saturated, and people have been eating animal fats for some time now and in fact using lard as their main cooking oil for eons. Your body is perfectly capable of digesting saturated fats, and the thing nutritionists worry about concerning the Atkins diet if the larger-than-normal amounts of saturated fats people take in from all the animal protein. Yet people still lose weight on the Atkins diet.

Hydrogenation of fats has been done commercially since at least the '20's, when oleo margarine was introduced, with no apparent correlation to obesity (saturated fats have been linked to arterial plaque and high cholesterol levels though). Nor is there much of a correlation between fast food itself and obesity. It's the amount of fast food we eat, not the nature of it. Here's a good article that examines the statistics:

http://www.policyreview.org/feb04/buchholz_print.html

Human nutrition has always been a subject that's long on opinion and rumor and very short on fact, largely because of the enormous amounts of money involved, and because most nutritionists really have very little hard scientific training. I remember as a kid being told by "The Better Breakfast Council" (honest to God) that we should start every day with toast, cereal, juice, eggs, meat and milk. The Better Breakfast Council was, of course, a food consortium that had a vested interest in wanting us to pig out first thing in the morning.

The latest bit of interesting nutiritional news comes from the Spicey Curry front, where scientists studying the anomalously low incidence of Altzheimer's Disease in India have new evidence that a substance in turmeric (a curry spice, and the stuff that gives prepared mustard its yellow color) is a potent anti-Altzheimer's agent. This is the same spice that was found to be carcinogenic in rats about 7-8 years ago. Can a compound be both? Sure. Why not?

Sorry for the tirade. I'm a chemist and this stuff bothers me.

---dr.M.

 

[snooper]

Odd

When I read about the Atkins diet I get thisterrible sense of deja vue.

Long years ago, in the second age of Middle Earth, when people were winning medals for shooting Germans my mother wanted to lose weight and everybody said she should cut out all starchy foods (potatos, bread, etc.) and all sugar and sugar-containing foods (sweets, chocolate, cake, etc.). It just didn't have a fancy name then.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

The thing about Atkins is that it involves a change in your metabolism. After 3 days of absolutely no carbohydrates, your body begins to burn its own stockpiles of fat for fuel. At this point, your body goes into a state known as Benign Dietary Ketosis (BDK) , and ketone bodies start showing up in your urine from the metabolized fat. These can be detected by peeing on little testing strips (“Ketostrips”, available from a pharmacist), so it's a real phenomenon.

If you don’t go into BDK—and not all people do, as I found out—then you can actually gain weight on the Atkins diet (as I also found out). And if you cheat just a little, you change your metabolism back to normal and lose the metabolic BDK advantage. So it’s more than just restricting carbs. You must keep your carb intake below something like 20 grams a day or you've blown it.

From what I understand, about 20% of the people who try Atkins are BDK resistant. For us, being on a no-carb diet makes us very irritable and cranky (low blood sugar) and constantly hungry. It just doesn’t work for everyone.

---dr.M.

 

[thenry]

Thank you Dr. M. for bring up the true nature of Atkins and BDK. It's called a fasting state, and it is neither truly healthy nor efficient, which is why you continue to lose weight. The reason dieters must continue strongly for three weeks without cheating is because that is when euphoria starts to kick in.

The primary method of weight loss is the mysterious "metabolic change," but it's actual mechanism is a little more complicated. Sugars are made up of six carbon atoms in a ring. They can be stored that way (glycogen), broken in half for inclusion into a number of types (protein, for instance) or broken into two carbon units for inclusion into fat. The problem with fat is the units are too small to turn back into sugar (glucose), your body prefers sugar, and your brain has to have it. During the first three weeks, your body breaks down whatever it can to make sugar, usually the protein in your diet and muscle mass, not where you want to be losing weight.

After three weeks of no sugar, the body enters the fasting state. Fat is converted to ketone bodies, which are chains of four to six carbon atoms and a handle. Your body and brain can live off of these, even though they are not sugar. The problem is that ketone bodies are inherently unstable and can fall apart into unusable bits, like acetone (nail polish remover), before they are used by the body for energy. These bits are what show up as Benine Dietary Ketosis.

The instability of ketone bodies is the primary theoretical mechanism for the atkins diet. Instead of using all six of the carbons of the original, pre-fat conversion sugar, one to two are being breathed out or peed out. In other words, because of a chemical instability in what your body is forced to use as food, 20% of the calories you ate fall apart and disappear. And that has always worried me a little.

 

[shereads]

There's a newer best-selling version of Atkins called the South Beach Diet. It's no carbs for only the first week, after which it's lean proteins and high-fiber carbs including vegetables and whole grains.

It's closer to the modified Atkins that A. himself recommended a few weeks before his death. In fact, it's basically what we all instinctively know we're supposed to be eating anyway.

"Have the sirloin instead of the prime rib; the marbling kills you," says the South Beach Diet doctor.

He maintains that the trouble with "white carbohydrates" is that they're so quickly digested, they leave you hungry again and in a cycle of high and low blood-sugar. He recommends the no-carb diet for one week only, to end carb cravings, and then adding the less processed and refined carbohydrates that are necessary for their antioxidant content, linked with prevention of heart disease and certain cancers.

I once tried going without any carbohydrates and before the end of the second day I was weak, had headaches, and crying jags. I had loved the idea of a diet that required me to eat bacon and eggs for breakfast. But I found out that without a bit of toast, I hated all that fat and protein. Carbs are my friend.

 

[Guest]

Vegetarians vs. Atkins: Diet Wars Are Almost Religious

NY Times - 2.22.2004 - by GINA KOLATA

HE charges that his group is like the Taliban. He claims that her group's dangerous message has "spread like a virus across North America, Europe and elsewhere."

The issue inspiring such invectives? Not religion, but diets.

The latest spat is between Veronica Atkins, widow of Robert Atkins, the doctor who promoted a low-carbohydrate diet, heavy on the meats, and the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a group that advocates vegetarianism.

After Dr. Atkins died last April, the vegetarian group obtained his medical records and gave them to The Wall Street Journal, which reported this month that he weighed 258 pounds and had signs of congestive heart failure. (Mrs. Atkins has said her husband's high weight was the result of fluid buildup from the accidental fall that killed him.)

The vegetarians had already formed their conclusions. "Many health authorities have been shocked and greatly troubled by the spread of the Atkins phenomenon," the group proclaimed on its Web site.

Obesity researchers say they know the phenomenon all too well. Weight loss can be like a religious epiphany. Someone loses weight on a diet. They are ecstatic and want to share the good news. "These people are believers," says Dr. Gary D. Foster, director of the weight and eating disorders program at the University of Pennsylvania. Diet books are written in the same spirit. "Evangelism creeps in,'' he said. "It's a way of marketing why this diet is different."

The arguments over diet go way back, said Dr. Rudolph L. Leibel, an obesity researcher at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons. "They are in fact an echo of the discredited scientific notion of vitalism," he said of the idea that living things are not governed by the laws of chemistry and physics.

Although vitalism was disproved 200 years ago, he said, it is behind the fevered search for a magic way of eating that can override the rigid scientific formula: calories in minus calories out govern weight gain and weight loss. Discovering a diet, Dr. Leibel says, "is almost like a revelation."

The 19th century saw, for example, the emergence of the Rev. Sylvester Graham, a promoter of vegetarianism for whom the Graham cracker was named. Graham insisted that people could rise above hunger and cravings if they would just stop being slaves to their stomachs. His followers favored fresh fruits and vegetables, grown without fertilizers, and made bran bread. They established "physiological boardinghouses" where people could live the Graham way. Skeptics were scathing. Dinner at a Graham house, they said, featured delicacies like "straggling radishes," "a soggy bunch of asparagus" and "corpses of potatoes," washed down with "a tumbler of cold water."

Low-carbohydrate diets emerged in 1825 in "The Physiology of Taste," a book by a French lawyer, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, that was a sensation across the Atlantic. He knew some would object to his prescription but, he warned, they would suffer the consequences:

" 'Oh Heavens!' all you readers of both sexes will cry out, 'Oh Heavens above! But what a wretch the Professor is! Here in a single word he forbids us everything we must love, those little white rolls from Limet, and Achard's cakes, and those cookies. He doesn't even leave us potatoes or macaroni! Who would have thought this of a lover of good food who seemed so pleasant?'

" 'What's this I hear?' I exclaim, putting on my severest face, which I do perhaps once a year. 'Very well then; eat! Get fat! Become ugly and thick, and asthmatic, finally die in your own melted grease. ' "

In 1863, the low-carbohydrate diet returned after the publication of "Letter on Corpulence'' by a London undertaker, William Banting. At 5 feet 5 and 202 pounds, he suffered, he said, "sneers and remarks of the cruel and injudicious." But after a doctor told him to cut back on carbohydrates, he lost 50 pounds. "I am most thankful to Almighty Providence for mercies received, and determined still to press the case into public notice as a token of gratitude," he wrote.

So many were converted that for decades in the United States, the word for dieting was "banting." The term is still used in Britain, says Dr. Hillel Schwartz, a cultural historian and visiting scholar at the University of California at San Diego.

By the turn of the century, another diet was all the rage. It was the work of Horace Fletcher, who was inspired by the deplored American habit of devouring food, barely taking time to chew it. Eat only when you are hungry, he said, eat only those foods you crave, and chew every morsel of food until no more taste can be extracted from it. As proof, Fletcher gleefully told how his weight had plummeted. In June 1898, he weighed 205 pounds. Four months later he weighed 163, losing seven inches from his waist.

He gained celebrity endorsements. Upton Sinclair chanced upon a magazine article about Fletcher. It was "one of the great discoveries of my life," he wrote. John D. Rockefeller Sr. was Fletcherizing. "Don't gobble your food," he wrote. "Fletcherize or chew very slowly when you eat."

But some became disillusioned. Henry James began with great enthusiasm, giving Fletcher's book "The New Glutton" to his neighbors and claiming it changed his life. He wrote to Edith Wharton about "the divine Fletcher" and to his friend Mrs. Humphrey Ward: "Am I a convert, you ask? A fanatic." But after five years, he was having stomach troubles his doctor attributed to Fletcherism. James found himself "more and more sickishly loathing food."

Over the next century, diet evangelism continued, with diet books and gurus extolling one program after another. Yet, notes Dr. Schwartz, "We keep coming back to the same kinds of diets recycled under different names." With the emergence of each new trend, he said, "there is a different explanation of why it is effective."

Today, more than ever, those who want to lose weight find themselves pushed and pulled by diet converts.

Jerry Gordon, a Philadelphia record producer, says that, at 5 feet 4 and 227 pounds, he is an obvious target for proselytizers, including his slender wife, who lives on a low-calorie diet. "She has been trying to get me to eat and behave like her for the last 22 years," he says.

On the other hand, it seems as if everywhere he looks, people are dropping pounds and telling him they are doing it not by restricting calories, but with a low-carbohydrate diet. Mr. Gordon enrolled in a research study, conducted by Dr. Foster, that randomly assigns people to the Atkins diet or a low-calorie one. He confesses that he was hoping for the Atkins diet. But he got the low-calorie one. "My wife is real excited," he said.