Last March I wrote a column about how much I hate the freaking Atkins diet. Saying something like that inspired such ferocious hate in the people who belong to the Church of Atkins that someone from New Zealand actually e-mailed me to tell me that I was wrong, and offered to pay me money if I changed my opinion.

Now that example might be a bit of a hyperbole, but the fact remains that if you badmouth the Atkins diet in front of somebody who is on the Atkins diet, they’ll react in pretty much exactly the same way as if you told them that their religion is wrong and they’ll never achieve salvation because ugly people always get what they deserve. And that’s saying a lot, because if you told most people that, they’d punch you in the chest.

I guess I can understand why people on a low-carb diet would get offended when people mock their bread-free lifestyle; this diet may well be their ticket out of the personal Hell that is having to wipe their asses with a wadded-up sheet of newspaper hooked onto the end of an unbent coat hanger. To them, any slander towards the Atkins diet might cause them to lose all hope in a diet that promises to shed pounds if one eats enough red meat.

But some people might not understand why people like myself (non-idiots) would bash the Atkins diet. We’ve never tried it, and we have no intention to, so what could we have against it? We couldn’t possibly be justified in being anti-Atkins, could we? Well yeah, we can, because we watch television.

Let me explain: You see, the point of dieting to lose weight is that you stop eating foods that make you gain weight (like entire wedding cakes or tubs of butter) so that you don’t gain any additional weight, and you start exercising so that you actually start to lose weight. But a low-carb diet is like something created by a mad scientist; if you want to lose weight you don’t have to exercise, as long as you just don’t eat any fiber.

So because the only requirement for a food to qualify as "Atkins-friendly" is that it be rid of carbs, any food can now be health food, even if it is covered in fudge or made out lard or coated in a thick layer of ice cream. And this is where my main problem with the Atkin’s diet comes in; some foods have carbohydrates in them, but apparently it is not that difficult to make those foods without any carbs.

And because of that fact, three-fourths of all commercials on TV are now for "Atkins friendly" products that have the Atkin’s logo on them (yes, Atkin’s has a logo, which looks a lot like a sport’s team logo, so don’t be surprised in five years when there’s a professional baseball team called the Portland Atkinses). These "Atkins friendly" foods run the gamut, from beer to yogurt, and all of the commercials for these stupid low-carb foods are exactly the same.

They go like this: the commercial starts with some idiot sitting on a park bench or in a restaurant or something like that, eating some raw meat. A voiceover chimes in with "So this low-carb thing is going great for you, isn’t it? But there is one thing that you miss, isn’t there?!" Then this idiot looks over and sees someone eating bread or yogurt or cereal, or drinking milk, or doing a beer bong, or whatever. And the voiceover says "that’s right, you miss bread/milk/beer, don’t you?" Then the idiot does something extremely wacky, such as imaging that another idiot’s head has turned into some delicious milk, or whatever, and then tries to drink his head.

Finally, the voiceover announces that the idiot’s agony is over, as there is now an Atkins-friendly bread or milk or beer or cigarettes or whatever. Then there is a shot of said product with the Portland Atkinses logo on it. The end.