the 'drinking man's diet'

well my family reunion looms it's ugly head in about a month, and I need to drop 20 lbs quick! i think i found a lifeline. i noticed a story about 'the drinking man's diet'. which was actually an early atkins diet prototype, as hard liquor has no carbs. In 1964, famed aerial photographer, bon vivant and playboy robert cameron decided all the flaxseed & carrot juice diet books of the period were useless, and wrote 'the drinking man's diet'.

"lose nine pounds in three weeks while still taking]two 600 p.m. tension-breaking martinis. take out your favorite girl for a dinner of squab and broccoli with hollandaise sauce and Chateau Lafite, to be followed by an evening of rapture and champagne."

it went world-wide & sold 2.4 million copies in less than two years! Then a harvard study published in all the major newspapers called it "equivalent to mass murder.”    -- and basically killed the diet overnight. poor robert cameron. at least he'd made a lot of money off the book, priced at 1$ a copy, and was still renowned for his aerial photography. then nearly fifty years later he noticed the new and thrilling atkins diet was pretty much the same as his, but without all the booze. it turns out his one unrealized dream was to get the book re-issued. then atkins croaked at 72, while this old f-cker was still walking the earth & drinking like a fish at 98! atkins died in 2003. cameron lived until 2009.

The diet seems a little peculiar these days, what with everyone crazy for quinoa and only eating chicken if it’s sourced from their very own backyard. But I was still intrigued. Despite the constant dirge about eating less and moving more, I thought that there must be something in a diet whose priorities sounded so similar to my own.

look! he's holding a cocktail!

www.forbes.com/2004/04/21/cz_af_0421feat.html

in a this new story I'm reading on the diet, a writer says, "My own start on the diet involved neither favorite girls nor squab nor aerial photographs. I began on a random Wednesday morning by cooking a two-egg omelet. With butter. And a few chunks of cheese and keilbasa. And then I headed out to get plastered."

okay, i've found my diet. see you bitches in 20 lbs!