The low-carb dieting situation is getting crucial. This afternoon, while enjoying a delightful al fresco Dascomb lunch on Wilder Bowl, my picnicking companion Seth threw his plate of Ring of Fire fried rice across the grass in a paroxysm of disgust. “Stop it!” my respected colleague shrieked. “Stop making me want you!”

In a final attempt to smother the very idea of carbohydrates, he overturned his plate into the grass and surveyed the widely-dispersed rice, stunned but satisfied. I think Prince pretty much summed up Seth’s love/hate relationship with carbs when he sang, “Why you wanna treat me so bad, when you know I love you?”

The Atkins dieting revolution is hardly newsworthy, but inexplicably I have recently born witness to nothing short of a barrage of Atkins-incited hysteria. Something akin to a fever pitch is being reached, both on the parts of haters and carb counters. Incidentally, my friend Seth, who provided us with the opening anecdote, prefers the South Beach diet to Atkins, the latter of which, he maintains, is “for tools.”

My two housemates, Page and Jessie, might take issue with this. Over spring break, both of them stayed in Oberlin to work on projects. When I came back to town, everything was different around the house. They had both very rapidly transformed into densely muscled towers of power, and they both had scurvy. “This is weird, guys,” I remarked, “I thought the only people who got scurvy were pirates and castaways.”

Apparently not. Atkins dieters can join the ranks of pirates and castaways as people who are so deficient in vitamin C that their gums start to bleed and they go crazy. Amidst the frenzy of their spring break productivity, Page and Jessie hadn’t had time to do any grocery shopping whatsoever, and were left to eat whatever we had in the house. Given the meager selection of eggs, nuts and leftover barbecue, they went on Atkins accidentally. The results, needless to say, were huge, but the side effects were pretty alarming. “There’s no lightness to my bounce anymore,” Page lamented.

Jessie recounted how every morning they would grab a hard-boiled egg out of the fridge for breakfast, and eat them “like apples.” It was a lifestyle to which they were bound, despite its increasingly detrimental effect on their health. For those unaware of the biological aspect of Atkins, the absence of carbohydrates in the diet puts the body into a state of ketosis; that is to say, the body starts to consume itself for lack of fuel.

Jessie and Page were, in a sense, Atkins purists. They didn’t “indulge” in Atkins brand products that make you feel like you’re eating carbs even though you’re really eating a kind of soy protein that leaves a rancid aftertaste. They simply pared down their diet so that they ate absolutely nothing besides protein. Their accidental methodology however, doesn’t have much in common with the way most people go about dieting Atkins-style.

I asked Seth to break down to me the difference between South Beach and Atkins. “Atkins is like the Wal-Mart of diets. Have you ever seen a big SB insignia on at least one stupid product in every aisle of the grocery store? I personally believe that [South Beach] is aimed at people who are a bit more nutrition-conscious and not just your everyday Joanne who wants a new, easy way to lose weight fast. I also think it’s for people who feel they have to read an entire book to ‘get’ how the diet works. It’s the intellectual diet.”

Atkins does seem to cater to people who are unwilling to fundamentally change their eating habits by creating a huge line of products that are imitations of foods that are really bad for you. Moreover, Atkins assumes that being able to eat all the bacon and fat you want while being on a diet is an inherently appealing thing. Seth regards this as a fundamental flaw in the Atkins approach. “I mean, what kind of reasonable person is going to buy into a diet that believes if you eat a lot of bacon and minimize the ‘bread’ in your sandwich to a wrap (which is basically just flattening it out) then the pounds will drop off like kids at a slumber party? Seriously.”

Jessie and Page went off Atkins as soon as they realized that they had become Schwartzennegerian protein-trons, and they both look back on the experience regretfully. Seth, meanwhile, has begun taking South Beach with a grain of salt. Eating habits, after all, are best considered tendencies rather than rules. Seth concurs. “During the first two weeks of South Beach, you’re not supposed to have even a drop of alcohol. Need I say more?”