When I first encountered an Atkins Diet book, I was working in an office. I had been working there for five or six years and had accumulated a fair bit of excess weight. I had never been active in sport, but my previous job had been working on site, which brought with it a certain amount of physical activity " just enough to keep me in reasonable shape. After five years of pen-pushing, I weighed 18 stone 12 pounds (264 lbs or 120 kg), up three stone and neither I nor my doctor were happy about it.