My name is Eric Ruark and this is the story of my journey how I learned of Dr. Atkins and where it led me. I want to extend a huge Thank You to Dr. E C Fulcher Jr for allowing me to share my story on his site regarding Health and Wellness. There are so many different options out there and many ways that help people every day, this is just my story of what helped me then, and when I am focused, continues to help me currently.

At 72 (almost 73) years old, I can actually say that I have had a weight problem almost all my life.  And I have proof.  Many years ago, I discovered an unlabeled tin with a reel with an 8mm film inside.  Since I happened to own an 8mm projector (we are talking about sometime in the early 1970s), I fed the reel into the projector and discovered that it had been taken by my father in 1949.  It was easy to date.  It was a film of ME coming home from the hospital for the first time. 

It was early March.  I had been “from my mother’s womb untimely ripped” at around 8 am on a Friday in late February.  The film showed me being passed around for all the relatives to handle and cuddle.  I look like a normal baby.  Then the film cuts to someone feeding me.  AND I’M FAT.  Fatface, still too young to feed me and obviously not wanting the food that was being forced into my mouth.  Every spoonful that went in, most of it was spit out and rolled down my chin.  Then there was the obligatory shot of the naked baby laying on the changing table.  At that time, I am so fat that I cannot pick my fat jowls up off the table.  I’m surprised I didn’t die in my crib for being too fat to roll over.

The problem is that I have never thought of myself as FAT.  When I look in the mirror, I do not see a fat person.  I see ME.  It’s hard to explain, but I have been fan/thin all my life.  Although I have been fat, I don’t remember myself as fat.  I remember seeing a picture of myself sitting in my grandmother’s black cherry tree and I’m not fat.  There was another photo of me wearing my Davy Crockett coonskin cap (courtesy of Walt Disney ca. 1956) and I’m not fat.  Yet, there is also a photo of me in the Meteorological Club as a freshman at Prep School (1962) and I am the big-bellied little kid on the left side of the line.  Also, there is the memory of being singled out by the football coach in grade school (along with Hemmy and Phil) as being the “cannon fodder” for the practices because the three of us were fat.  I distinctly remember being 136-pounds in the sixth grade (1960).  It was something about the sixes that stood out in my mind. 

Fat/thin has never been important to me because there is a ME that I see when I look into a mirror that is “perfect”.   If I gain or lose weight, I do not notice it.  I notice it only in the way my clothes fit (or don’t) or the way that people treat me.  I have been picked on when fat.  I have been bullied when I was fat.  I had the worst first senior prom imaginable, and I was thin.  (I attended two, but that story doesn’t belong here.) My weight always seemed to be other people’s problems, not mine.

The person who had the most problem with my weight was my mother, a realization that has led me to consider myself an abused child.  After all, she was the one who “made” me fat to begin with as a means of control.  (I told you this was a personal odyssey.) 

Around 1965, I hit 220-pounds.  At that time, my mother was bemoaning my weight to her BFF, Bibbi, who was married to a prominent New York Attorney.  Bibbi told my mother about a doctor in NYC that was having remarkable success in helping people lose weight – a man named Dr. Robert Atkins.  So, my mother got me an appointment.  In retrospect, I think that this was a put-up or shut-up moment.  Bibbi called Mom’s bluff.  If he has a weight problem, then do something about it, kind of thing.  (Bibbi’s family had that kind of effect on my mother’s family.  It caused the death of my grandfather, but my mother and grandmother never held Bibbi’s family accountable.)

Now, my going to see Dr. Atkins was not a simple thing.  I was in a New England boarding school with rules and regulations out the wahzoo.  These were old school rules, from our 6:35 am rising bell to only being allowed off the school property only three times a month.  So, for me to go to Dr. Atkins required a whole bevy of hoops to jump through.  Also, I was in school in Connecticut and Dr. Atkins was in New York City.

Well, all the i’s were dotted, and my father drove me down to NYC to see the doctor.  And with that first appointment began my education about foods, which ones our bodies need, and which ones are bad for us.  Dr. Atkins was very forthcoming about his theories and the research he and his fellow doctors were doing.  And with that began a sustained program that literally took me out of the school dining hall and placed me in the infirmary kitchen cooking my food separate from the rest of the school body.  There were some meals I could eat with my classmates, like bacon and eggs in the morning.  But on those mornings when the school was serving pancakes or French toast, I was over in the infirmary cooking my Canadian bacon and frying my eggs.  (There is a photo in my prep school yearbook of me cooking some lamb chops in the infirmary.)

With the weight loss, several things changed.  I became more active.  As a fat kid, I managed the school’s sports teams.  As someone losing weight, I began to play them, specifically ice hockey and lacrosse.  When I graduated and headed to college, I took up rowing and ended up on the Varsity-8.  I even rowed against the East Germans in the Cherry Blossom Regatta in Washington, D.C.   I had a 48-inch chest and a 19-inch waist.  (Apparently, my kidneys are higher in my body cavity than in most people.)  But, again, looking in the mirror, I didn’t see a difference in who I was.

I started to gain weight again, after college when my first wife got pregnant.  I gained weight right along with her.  I stopped following the Atkins regimen and just bean eating and drinking whatever I wanted.  With marriage and three kids, I got fat again.  The divorce didn’t help matters.  After my divorce, I tried Atkins again, but it wasn’t working.  I contacted Dr. Atkins again, and he immediately saw me.  As I got older, my metabolism was changing, and he tried to get me back into the sink of things.  But I lost interest.  I had nothing and no one to succeed for including myself.  Since I never saw a difference, I figured, why bother.  And then came 1989.

In 1989 I probably weighed in the vicinity of 300-pounds, and my gallbladder went south and I developed gall stones.  Only, my gall stones were not the usual “stones” but were the size of coffee grounds and they plugged the channel that allowed my pancreas to release digestive acids into my intestines.  The end result was that my pancreas blew up like a balloon and ruptured spilling the digestive acids into my body.  When that happens, you basically get cut in half by your own body from the inside out.  If the doctors catch it early enough, they put you in a medically induced coma and tie you down to the hospital bed to allow the acids to eat their way out of your body without destroying any major organs and drain into a rubber sheet.

In most cases, it’s a death sentence, but mine was unique in that the acids did not “turn on” and were caught by the caul that surrounds the pancreas.  I had to have several painful procedures to have the caul drained.  And in order to keep the pancreas from producing digestive juices, my entire digestive system had to be turned off.  For over 40-days, I was not allowed to eat or drink.  I had a tube running down my nose into my stomach in order to suck up any fluids that got down my throat.  To make a long story short, I miraculously healed.  My doctor said that if I hadn’t been fat, I would be dead.  I lost close to half my body weight and by the time I got out of the hospital (off and on I spent close to 4-months flat on my back) I was thin.

Because both my gallbladder (which had been removed) and because my pancreas had been damaged, my diet was severely limited.  But the strange thing was that my limited diet was practically hardcore, Atkins.  So, for three years, I was a good boy.  And, then I got complacent.  I began doing things that I should not have done, eating and drinking things I should have avoided, and I began to gain weight again.

In 2016, I noticed that my waist was 54-inches and I began a concentrated effort to lose weight.  I went back on Atkins and dropped 14-inches. (I don’t own a scale.)  And then once again, I got complacent.  Remember, all this time, whether fat or thin, I only see ME.  I don’t see myself as fat or thin.  My waist got down to 40-inches and I got complacent again and started not watching what I was eating.  I gained 8-inches on my waist.

Then came January 2021 when my Pastor said that I should think about getting back into acting.  The next day, I received a promotion for headshots out of the blue.  It was a scam, but one that I knew I could take advantage of.  So, I did.  When I saw the headshots, I did not like the way I looked.  To me, I looked fat.  So, I decided to do something about it… again… and went back on the Atkins regimen.  Once more, I am losing weight and inches.  And thanks to my Pastor’s suggestion I have been in a movie that has won two international awards including one from the coveted Cannes Film Festival.

I am also more concerned about my health than I ever was.  I recently changed my insurance policy and because of that, I had to get a whole battery of tests.  My blood pressure is slightly elevated and because it was slightly elevated, it brought my cholesterol into question.  So, now I am on blood pressure medication and a statin for my cholesterol.  It is my hope that by continuing on Atkins, I will be able to stop all medications since, back in the day, Dr. Atkins got my diabetic grandmother off all her meds and controlled her blood pressure and insulin production using diet only.  I know what to do.  I just have to decide to do it.

Written By Eric B. Ruark

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