Well, its day 5 of the strange Atkins regime. At this stage, I'm supposed to be having bursts of energy, and wandering around like a mad thing. I'm supposed to have very bad breath. But, infact I'm just feeling, well, kind of normal.
Tosha, meanwhile, has had the worst time - she has been feeling lethargic and flu-ridden. She entered full-blown Ketosis (testing strips were off the scale) on day 2. She has been complaining of halitosis (and has been chewing lots of parsley to combat this). I must add that this is something which only she observed - she always smells very sweet to me!
So, why is the Atkins diet not having the expected effects on me? Am I human? Am I an alien? Is this connected with my ability to generate huge amounts of interference just by stepping close to a transistor radio? Is it connected with my unearthly discover at the age of 8 that one of my front teeth is highly radioactive (mis-spent youth playing with Geiger-Counters)? Is it Henry, the mild mannered janitor?
I guess I'll find out in time.
As western society moves steadily away from reliance on the outdated trappings of religion, we all struggle for something to believe in. Being as most western religions have built themselves around notions of restraint, moderation, denial, and the benefits of pain and hardship, it is no surprise that diets have come to fill the void.
There are marked parallels between diet and religion. Where religions have their own sects each devoted to some obscure details (known as “the division of the shoe and the gourd”), the world of diets contains many competing schisms (e.g. Atkins, Zone, South Beach).
Diets can offer meaning and order to people who otherwise increasingly out of control of a life with no meaning. Eaten chocolate? No matter! Get back on track by going back to Induction Phase 1, drinking two SlimFasts eating a communion wafer. Killed someone? No problem, confess, say a few Hail Mary's and you're back on the road to eternal life.
Dieters and divine believers also share the scorn of the public at large. Mainstream science loves to ridicule the latest fad diet (see Atkins as PseudoScience) just as much as it loves to prove that prayer cannot help people. Mind you, extreme religious fanatics (David Koresh, David Icke) deserve derision just as much as extreme dieters (er, David Blaine, whose new book “The Blaine Diet Revolution” will doubtless be on the shelves of your local Waterstones before Christmas). Or maybe this is just something about people called David?
I do not subscribe to the teachings of the church of Atkins (and the parallel churches of Zone and South Beach), but I think there is something in the whole lo-carb stuff. Consequently, I'm currently on day 2 of the Atkins diet. It's OK so far (some minor sugar cravings, but that's about it).
At least it isn't Catholicism.
As you can see, the website is finally back on line, following a 1 month period of being completely inaccessible. This is entirely due to a company called Streamlinenet, who have proved to be somewhat inept at providing a hosting service.
Just over one month ago they accidentally deleted the website in its entirety (music, blogs, comments, everything). Ah well, accidents happen.
I mailed them several times about this, to no response. (Actually, they frequently ignore mails, so I wasn't actually too surprised). On this occasion, they mailed me saying “we've lost all of our emails - if you've sent anything in the past three days, please send it again”. Unfortunately, after a further two weeks of “an engineer looking into the problem” it transpired that they didn't have a backup of my site either.
They've then taken about a week to transfer my domain name to Supanames. On the upside, Supanames seem to be doing an excellent job to date (and the web site is about 30x faster than the Streamlinenet one). So, hurrah for a bear!