Well, it is that time again. Another new year has
come and like millions of 21st century desk dwellers,
I’m on the hunt for a way to drop a few pounds and
fast. I have given the diet idea plenty of lip service,
but it wasn’t until a surprise letter came in
the mail this week that I got serious about my quest
for the perfect regimen.

Last week, I gave blood at the local blood bank.
There supply was critically low. According to the
blood bank employees, it has been the worst month on
record. So, I made my donation and didn’t think
anything of it. Well, today I received a letter in the
mail from the blood bank. Of course, that can never be
good news. My mind raced with the millions of possible
life threatening illnesses that could be coursing
through my veins. Was this a letter asking, no
imploring, me to never give blood again?

With paranoid mind and shaking hand, I opened the
envelope and found out the blood bank was now giving
back to donors. This was a head’s up on my cholesterol
level. When I saw the figure of 217, something didn’t
seem right. So, I read the letter again carefully and
found out I was “borderline.” Most people in our
fast food society wouldn’t think 217 is so bad. The
figure startled me. See, I’m only 27 and I had
open-heart surgery as a toddler, so I had to take this
seriously. My weight loss goal just made top priority.

Like all good investigators these days, my quest
began on the Internet. Sure this is the place devoted
to refinancing every mortgage, enlarging every man's
um, pride, and promising a camera in each dorm room. I
knew if there was truth to be found it would be found
on the Internet. Boy did I find some truth! The
general consensus is that heredity is the biggest
culprit among cholesterol’s 200 + club. I had one
strike against me since my father, aunt and most of my
relatives fight this battle. In the last year, I had
managed to quit smoking and join a gym. Despite
looking more like Danny and less like Arnold, I do
make use of my gym membership.

I was down one, but up two on the checklist of
cholesterol culprits. My next step was to find out
what dietary changes I can make to lower my
cholesterol and loose weight. What I found was a whole
lot of nothing. I immediately felt like Dorothy trying
to get directions from the Scarecrow. One website
advocated a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet based on
the “you are what you eat” principle. Another
advocated a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet with the
same promises of weight loss and low cholesterol.

In order to get to the bottom of this conflicting
information, I visited the Internet home of the
biggest trend going this season (no, it wasn’t the
“Queer Eye For the Straight Guy” website). I made my
way over to www.atkins.com. If you haven’t heard about
Dr. Atkins and his diet revolution, then you have been
living in a cave in Afghanistan. After sifting through
the praises for Dr. Atkins’ program, I finally found
an article addressing cholesterol.

In a nutshell, the Atkins plan doesn’t cause a huge
dip in your cholesterol level, but instead promises
and increase in HDL (also know as the “good
cholesterol”). Of course, most medical professionals
would point out to you that the increase is HDL is the
result of an increase in fat in your diet brought on
by the very liberal intake of animal products. HDL is
the cholesterol that cleans out all the bad
cholesterol, otherwise known as LDL. Atkins’ arguments
about weight control made sense, since my own yearlong
foray into vegetarian living resulted in a 10-pound
weight gain.

After a promising look around on the website, I
remembered that I know quite a few people who have
tried the Atkins diet. Almost every one of them had to
battle headaches, overwhelming cravings and most ate
something as innocent as a bowl of rice, only to find
the pants they were wearing immediately became
tighter. What is the point of a diet you can never
live with, since the new wisdom is lifestyle changes,
not diets, work best?

I was back to square one with Atkins. I figured
since the long-term effects of this way of eating are
unknown (the Atkins nutritional approach isn’t much
older than I am) I would look to see what the health
experts advocated. One guru of the traditional low-fat
and high-carbohydrate diet is Dr. Dean Ornish. I
wondered over to his website hosted by Web MD.
Doctors, I thought, would know the answer. My own
uncle is a doctor who specializes in the study of
diabetes and he is always a wealth of nutritional
advice. So, I sought Dr. Ornish’s wisdom.

The Ornish lifestyle is about as extreme as the
Atkins diet’s induction period, except, it’s the exact
opposite. Instead of a traditional low-fat diet including grilled
chicken and fish, Ornish advocates a strict regimen of
no meat, low-fat dairy in moderation and more natural
carbohydrates like whole grain breads. Basically, if
it taste good, it is bad for you. Additionally, Ornish
stresses daily exercise and meditation in the form of
yoga. This all makes great health sense, but who can
maintain that lifestyle? I have a friend who runs
marathons and is in phenomenal shape, but he still
drinks the occasional Coke or (gasp!) beer.

I suspected the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
My searches lead me to Dr. Barry Sear’s Zone Diet.
The basic principal of the Zone is that you eat
several small meals a day and each one has a balance
of carbohydrates, proteins and fat. It makes great
sense and seems pretty logical. No food is banished
from this way of eating and it has some great
principals on moderation. In fact, the website
www.zoneperfect.com gives seekers a “quick and dirty”
way of doing the Zone. Your protein intake should be
the size of your palm and if you eat a good
carbohydrate (like broccoli) you get two fists worth
and a bad carbohydrate (like anything you would
actually WANT to eat) you eat one tight fist worth.
Simple enough.

The problem with the Zone is that in the real world,
it isn’t that cheap to get a palm size amount of
protein 5 or more times a day. You can modify the Zone Diet
into a block method which makes sure you get the
perfect nutritional balance for the day, but after
reading this section of the website, I realized why I
don’t have a math degree from Georgia Tech. This diet
is a permanent commitment to measuring and guessing
your food intake. Counting calories would be
easier and most “experts” agree that is the only sure
fire way to loose weight and be healthy.

In the end, there are thousands of diets that base
their principals on when you eat or what foods you
combine. There really is no consensus. The same
medical establishment that gave us the food pyramid
once told us there’s nothing wrong with smoking.
The truth is, no one really seems to have the answer,
yet every dietary expert is passionate about his or
her own beliefs. Maybe I’ll just go back to drinking
coffee and smoking all day. It doesn’t improve your
overall health, but it does make shopping for
fashionable clothes easier. In the age of $4 coffees
and public smoking bans, I think I’ll just keep eating
what I want and let my insurance company buy me a
gastric bypass for Christmas next year.