In other words, eat only these foods and you'll be fine. It's an approach that's a mainstay of low-carb diets -- and an approach the company feels will be attractive to many men.
At Atkins Nutritionals, the company founded by Robert Atkins, which is now an international enterprise that sells food products and provides information about the diet, there is resistance to seeing Atkins dieters through a gender prism.
"The appeal of Atkins is not just limited to men," says Stuart Trager, an orthopedist and the medical director of Atkins Nutritionals as well as the chairman of the Atkins Physical Council. "Obesity and overeating cross gender lines. . . . We're seeing a move in general toward results-oriented programs that appeal to the new health-conscious and weight-conscious [group of dieters]. That includes perhaps more men than it has in the past."
That said, at one of the Atkins-inspired Web sites (which are not sponsored by the company but have sprung up as forums where dieters can discuss their experiences and concerns), there's a special chat room for men where participants discuss their experiences on the diet -- from sexual implications and how it affects weight training to recipes.
Take, for example, Web site chatter from Oregon last month: "I was really self-conscious about [dieting]. I told people at work I was on it (if it came up) but I always added 'Even if I don't lose any weight . . . I feel great.' Then when the pounds started falling off it was the guys who were the most supportive telling me how great I looked and how Atkins was really working."
And another from Denver earlier this summer: "I generally don't like talking about dieting at all. I remember being right out of high school and working at a bank . . . sitting in the lunch room listening to the women talking about all the different diets. . . . They had the various menus memorized. . . . I'm at a point now where I do occasionally brag about it. When I go out to lunch with a customer and they see how I'm ordering and immediately pick it up as Atkins (everyone knows Atkins) I always end up talking about it. [I] make it a point to tell them I'm already 60 lbs down, because NO ONE can argue about success."
Just how long the low-carb landslide will last is anybody's guess. And there aren't any long-term studies to show how successful its dieters are in keeping the weight off. For that matter, we don't know for sure that men as a group are dieting more than they used to, although it certainly looks that way.
If men are dieting in increasing numbers, what is the reason? Have baby boomers reached an age where unless they stay fit, high cholesterol, diabetes and coronary heart disease are just around the corner? Is the relentless tide of information about obesity in America hitting close to home? Has popular culture, with its trendy metrosexuals and women who openly discuss men's bodies on TV shows like "Friends" and "Sex and the City," made men more aware of their sexual attractiveness?
It's probably a little of all of the above.
At Weight Watchers, for example, research has indicated that men go on diets primarily for the same reasons that women do: to feel and look better, as opposed to a concern about their health.
In contrast, LaPuma finds that his patients (who tend to be CEOs, very successful people, yet they haven't been able to solve their weight problems) care mightily about potential health hazards of being overweight. "They don't want the fact they're obese or hypertense or have high cholesterol to steal from them what they've earned in life," he says.
Whatever the reason for dieting, the weight problem isn't going to go away -- for women or for men. "There's too much food out there, too many choices. It's too tempting," says NYU's Bentley. "We're in desperate times."
