I’ve passed nearly a month of silence from these posts.  It’s a good thing – I’ve been too busy living to write.  Marcus’s emergence from the cocoon of secondary school, an uptick in my work schedule, a miraculous California weekend with friends, and even a return to my beloved “night job” of video editing have kept me off the keyboard.

But I’m once again in a confessional frame, to expiate my new sin of promiscuous carnivorosity.

I know, it’s not a word.  But there are no words for the blood-lust of my current eating habits.  Euphemistically dubbed the “Modified Atkins” diet for G-rated marketing purposes, it should really be named the “Feedlot Delight” or the “PETA’s Most Wanted” regime.   As much bacon, steak, fat, tallow, grease, lard, butter, eggs, cream, chops, haunches, patties, roasts and organs as I can manage.  An acquaintance today informed me of a website where I can order specially-prepared duck lard, to add to the ghoulish mess.  I did not ask what you put the duck-lard on, or whether you just eat it straight with a spoon.

On the flipside, no sugars or carbs of any kind – no fruit, no bread, no pasta, not even fleshy vegetables such as carrots or artichoke.  Onions are borderline verboten.  For the first months, only 30 carb grams or less per day.  You exceed that with an apple.

Although I crave mightily the whole-grain breads, fresh pastas, and sweet nectarines of my previous dietary virtue, I confess I’m reveling in the gore.  Last week I had a business breakfast at a restaurant famed for biscuits and beignets.  I defiantly ordered a cheese omelet with two sides of bacon.  The waitress recoiled but complied, and the six strips arrived in a tic-tac-toe lattice of shame.  When she came back to see if we needed anything else, I replied devilishly, “More bacon.”  They nearly kicked me out.

The reason for all this carnivorosity is that the modified Atkins diet has been allegedly “shown” to control seizure.  I take this advice with a large dose of skepticism, given that the current state of nutrition research makes Congress look like a house of consensus.  The diet bookshelf at Barnes and Noble chiefly features books debunking other books, labeling the opposite views as hoaxes and cons, perpetrated either by agribusiness or the scaremongering media.  I’ve never paid it any attention.  But as I tick off the non-invasive options left on my list, this one seemed like the next thing to try, before I go back to my old friend cannabis (the reason I haven’t tried that yet is that I recall pot as making you stupid, and in my vanity I think I’d rather seize).

Two weeks in, it’s so far, so good.  If this works, I’ll have to figure out how to climb at least a branch or two down the food chain, so as to lighten my conscience and unclog my arteries.  No doubt I’ll be gulping protein powders, perhaps fortified with cubes of defrosted blood-worms, such as I used to feed to my kids’ tropical fish.  Then I’ll be offending no one except the six militant members of Humanitarians Upholding the Rights of Larvae (HURL).  That I think I can handle.  How I’ll face a lifetime of Stevia and almond flour makes me more nervous – but I’m comforted by the fact that, in a few years, the dietary advice will change again, and I’ll be gorging on croissants AND pate de fois gras.