17 Lifetime Maintenance
17 Lifetime Maintenance
The bells should be ringing, the flags should be flying: You ' re there! You ' ve arrived at the place where millions of overweight people have never been since they were children-at the weight you were meant to be. And the impact on every part of your life is enormous. Am I right?
Take a good long look in the mirror, try on your newly tailored clothes or climb into duds you haven ' t been able to shoehorn yourself into for years, and then-oh, bliss-listen to the comments people make. I ' ll bet you ' ve taken center stage. Losing weight sure attracts attention! And who doesn ' t want to look his or her best?
Now let me interject a reality check. Have you won the battle of the bulge? Or have you only graduated from boot camp, in shape now for the battle ahead? I can personally attest to the fact that you have achieved the latter. Recidivism among people who have lost considerable weight is such a well-documented phenomenon that many cynical doctors advise their patients not to even bother trying to lose. Fortunately with Atkins, such pessimism is unwarranted. This is not to say you don ' t need a lifetime maintenance plan accompanied by unceasing vigilance. This chapter supplies you with the former; the determination to succeed is your responsibility.
Before she saw me, Mary Anne Evans had given up. " I said to myself, `I ' m simply going to be fat for the rest of my life.' I weighed 209 pounds when I came to see you, and I had been putting on weight steadily for twenty years-especially after the birth of each of my kids."
At five feet five inches tall and 42 years old, Mary Anne ' s 200-plus weight load was a health hazard and a half, and I told her so. She had tried countless diets-low-calorie diets, including Weight Watchers, a hospital-based program that measured calories and a liquid-protein diet on which she had lost more than 30 pounds in three months and gained back, with interest, in four.
So what was the use? Besides, she hadn ' t come to me with weight loss in mind. Her problems were medical. Mary Anne ' s blood pressure was an abnormally elevated 160 / 100, she had a number of allergies, and her chief complaint was the extreme fatigue she had endured for the past several years. Add her excess weight to all that, and I knew she was heading into a difficult midlife physical crisis. I recommended and she agreed to do Atkins.
" By the second week doing Induction, I realized I felt really good," recalls Mary Anne. " I had a lot more energy than I ' d had on my old diet, and I wasn ' t hungry."
After five weeks, she ' d lost 21 pounds, and her blood pressure was a normal 120 / 78. It took nine months for her to get to 139 pounds. " I lost weight without any hassle," she says. " I was eating things I really liked to eat anyway. And the change in my life was incredible. Before, my favorite position had been sitting. Now I go out camping with my youngest son, and last summer I went horseback riding in the Rockies. The people at the lab where I work can ' t believe the new me. I go out to lunch with some of the other women who are on diets, and they can ' t seem to lose weight, and they ' re hungry. And I ' m sitting there eating a juicy hamburger and a large salad."
Another two years have passed. Mary Anne ' s weight still hovers around 142. She has a glass of wine before dinner a couple of nights a week, and she eats two potatoes weekly. Her only other carbohydrates are plenty of vegetables and salads. She ' s on a luxurious regimen that she enjoys. She ' s full of energy, and her blood pressure is normal.
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