by Matt St. Amand

Created on: February 19, 2009

My appetite was once a beastly, boundless, embarrassing thing. Virtually an entity unto itself. Take me to a buffet in the bad old days and I would morph into a cross between Homer Simpson and John Belushi. Hunger was irrelevant while in the act of eating. When food was present, I'd eat to the point of exhaustion. When I was away from food, my hunger was all-consuming. An hour after breakfast, I'd be at work with hunger pangs ripping through me as though I hadn't eaten in days. After a day of snacking before and after lunch, I'd arrive home like a Norseman and plunder the refrigerator. It would be nothing to eat half a block of cheese or a dozen slices of salami while waiting for my actual meal to heat up in the microwave. One day at the office, feeling particularly uncomfortable - my belt on its last notch and digging into me like a hangman's noose - I paused from my technical writing duties and hashed out some lyrics for the world's first diet song. I titled it "Murder Pants."

The madness went on for years, until the night my wife and I attended a benefit dinner for Children's Diabetes. There, I saw some girls I hadn't seen since high school, back in my svelte days when I could throw down four Whoppers after a few hours of galloping up and down the basketball court. Confronted with my past and present in a single evening, I knew I had to make a change - a real break from my countless failed attempts in the past of simply trying to consume smaller portions of the foods that formed my obsession with eating. Total non-starter.

In order to make a clean break from those failures, I turned to the Atkins Diet. Although the book I followed was about the size of War and Peace, I have made great use of the "Carbohydrate Gram Counter" card in the very front of the book, and the lists of foods recommended in the "And Away You Go: The Induction Phase" chapter. The only real hitch I ran into was Dr. Atkins' assumption that his adherents could all eat eggs. I'm deathly allergic to them, so that knocked omlettes and other meals off of my drastically shrinking personal menu.

That said, coming off the carbs wasn't as awful an experience as I'd feared. Up to that point, my daily eating was like Carb Jungle, swinging from one starchy vine to another. My gosh, no wonder I could never lose weight! When I finally did begin to see results, they were noticeable in my face, and I experienced a weird, cold feeling in my arms. Among the biggest surprises during the diet was how much weight

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