The Demise of Atkins and Low Carb

It was announced this week that the Atkins Foundation has, or will shortly, file for bankruptcy.

Two or three years ago, low carb and the Atkins Revolution were the absolute rage and directly led to the flood of low carb products on the market. Why such a huge fall?

Undoubtedly the death of Dr. Atkins was instrumental in that his program has been hugely misunderstood and misrepresented and there was no longer a clear spokesperson to set the record straight. Competing diet plans and nutritional gurus attacked incessantly, slowly developing a public wariness towards the program. The rumor that Dr. Atkins had been overweight when he died was but another nail in the coffin.

But one wonders if even had the good doctor lived longer, would his Diet Revolution have continued to thrive?

Take a look at recent historical trends. For the past thirty years, diet programs have come and gone as regularly as clockwork. We eagerly embraced every new proposal that came along, convincing ourselves that, at last, we had found the secret to eternal weight control. Depending upon the diet of the day, we clutched our plastic bags of spinach, hauled around cans of liquid or packages of instant shakes, wiped out commercial supplies of lecithin and kelp, and tried every pill that promised what we wanted so badly to believe.

Despite the examples and testimonials paraded before us, and the earnest exhortations of the daytime talk shows, we found that nothing worked. Millions of us fork over money every week to online diet sites, raking in billions of dollars a year, and every month we grow fatter and fatter.

What's wrong?

The answer is in our head. Let's talk about that next time.