After listening to the testimonials over the years, I finally took the plunge and started the Atkins diet. There’s something just a bit cultish about Atkins dieters, especially when a bunch of them get together and talk about their carbohydrate intake. For a long time I had the same attitude about them that I have about hockey fans: I didn’t understand their madness and didn’t want to.

Yet one of the things that intrigued me about this diet was that I had heard about it from a broad assortment of friends and relatives who would have little else in common. This cross-section of humanity, which seemed to be growing large enough to merit its own census category, generally agreed on one thing: Too many carbs make you fat. They also seemed to be getting thinner.

Even though I’m now technically one of these people, I’m still a bit skeptical. For one thing, the first two weeks can be rather dreadful.

It’s called “induction,” just like the initiation into the Army. During the first 14 days, you basically get to eat protein, supplemented by two to three cups of salad and vegetables each day. Actually, the literature says you should do this for at least 14 days, implying that longer is better. Maybe there are people nutty enough to do that.

My problem is that I’m not really a carnivore at heart. In my normal life, I basically eat a lot of carbohydrates with a little bit of meat thrown in for good measure. The Atkins diet is telling me to eat in the opposite proportions from my normal routine.

I quickly got to the point where the thought of eating another piece of meat was almost more than I could take. Eggs proved to be another stumbling block. After being told for years that eggs and fat were bad, here’s the Atkins diet saying that a healthy breakfast can consist of fried eggs and as many strips of bacon as you want.

The whole thing is counter-intuitive. Everything you thought you knew about how to eat in order to lose weight gets turned inside out.

But it does seem to work, even if you don’t follow it as rigidly as the rules suggest. I lost eight pounds in the first 10 days and I cut lots of corners. One morning when I found myself unable to stomach another Atkins-approved breakfast, I had a cup of cereal with soy milk instead. I still lost two pounds that day. I also went out for Thai food and had two meals in Mexican restaurants during the induction period and after each of these infractions my weight dropped the next day.

On each of those occasions I clearly violated the rule of limiting my carb intake to 20 grams per day, however I’m convinced that avoiding certain foods is more important than counting carbs. For example, when I ordered a taco salad, it came without beans, sour cream and the tortilla. You can still have a more or less decent meal on taco meat, lettuce, tomato, guacamole and cheese. It’s certainly a better meal than a slab of meat and a few leaves of lettuce.

From what I can tell, white flour, corn, sugar and starchy foods like potatoes are what’s evil. Avoid them, and you’re halfway there. As I move up the carbohydrate ladder, as they say in Atkins land, and get to add in more healthy carbs, I should be able to get back to cooking more normally.

If I look at it that way, rather than as an endurance test, it starts to seem reasonable, sort of. One of my friends cheerfully tells me that we will be eating this way forever, which seems like a stretch. Forever, after all, is a very long time.