Some friends from out of town are coming to visit Nashville for the first time. Your mission is to show them around, give them a taste of the city, rid them of whatever misconceptions or preconceived notions they may have brought along for the ride. You have the whole day planned—but first, breakfast. You take them to a local institution beloved in part for its history but mostly for its food: scrambled eggs fluffed with cream and topped with melting cheese; glistening, twitching-hot bacon cut and fried in generous slices; fresh-from-the-oven buttermilk biscuits (delectables so evocative in name that no adjectives are required); and all of it covered in the traditional redeye gravy, named, so the story goes, for it’s eye-opening combination of bacon grease and coffee grounds. Your friends attack the irresistible food like hyenas. Then they buy a peanut-butter-jar-sized bottle of Maalox and retire to their hotel room for the rest of the day.

OK, maybe this isn’t exactly a common way for people to spend their first few hours here, but then it’s not exactly out of the realm of possibility either. Nashvillians have a lot to be proud of, to be sure, and traditional country fare is most definitely a part of that. But remember, we live here. We don’t have a “normal” diet to go back to—this is our normal diet. And it adds up.

“I think, in terms of obesity statistics, we tend to run a little high,” says registered dietitian Donna Gurchiek, being kind. “And it’s not too surprising when you think about how much lard is used here, in pork rinds, in donuts.... I think these are some of the things that put us right there at the top.”

Whitney Kemper, a Nashville attorney and an active member of the Nashville Striders, a local runners’ association, agrees. “Your Southern diet tends to encourage overeating, and overeating often, at that. In fact, if you look at the stats,” he adds, noting that his observation is a general one, and from memory, “you’ll see that [Tennessee is] one of the top states, percentage-wise, in smoking, drinking and food consumption.” The triple crown. But remember, scoring high in this instance is bad, like in golf—and if you’ve ever played golf, you know how incredibly difficult it is to claw your way back to par when you consistently shoot high.

But, as attached to tradition as we Nashvillians can be—and that includes Southern culinary traditions in general—we also live in a city on the move, in every sense of the word, which means that America’s trends quickly become our trends (with a Nashville twang).

Which brings us to the Atkins Diet. Back in the 1970s, a physician named Robert Atkins started a “diet revolution.” His weight-loss plan became a huge success, selling millions of copies in its book form. At about the same time, the U.S. government, along with its relevant agencies and departments, was in the process of developing a single dietary plan that would keep Americans healthy, or at least give them a fighting chance. The Department of Agriculture created the food “pyramid,” a division of food into five groups with their respective recommended servings per day, with an emphasis on carbohydrate-heavy foods such as bread and pasta.

Atkins’ approach, on the other hand, was to eliminate everything but meat, cheese and the occasional vegetable. So, to make it clear, Atkins completely removed the pyramid’s largest group (bread, rice and pasta), as well as the fruit (one of the two second-largest groups in the pyramid), and replaced it all with the two smallest pyramid groups: milk and cheese, plus meat, poultry, fish and eggs. In other words, he picked the pyramid up and stuck it on its pointy little head.

As the years went by, despite the initial manic success of the Atkins Diet, the food pyramid took root and settled in for good. Atkins, meanwhile, has always had his followers, but the medical community has overwhelmingly viewed his approach as unhealthy. But now, in a twist on the slightly embarrassing tradition of college kids trading in their ’70s retro bell bottoms for ’80s retro skinny ties, the Atkins Diet is back, and it’s making a stronger run at America’s waistline than ever. The New York Times Magazine even dedicated a cover piece recently to arguing the health benefits of the meat-based diet. But with undeniable success here in Nashville and across the country notwithstanding, it’s still an uphill battle.

“For initial weight loss, yes, the high-protein/low-carbohydrate diets, like Atkins’, are successful,” says Amy Cranford, a clinical dietitian at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. “But most of the research indicates that a low-calorie diet—as opposed to a low-carbohydrate diet—does work better in the long run.”

“There’s a distinct advantage to a high-protein diet if you’re trying to lose weight,” says Sandy VanHooydonk, a certified personal trainer and a lifelong Nashvillian. “The problem is that programs like the Atkins Diet take the stand that protein is good and carbohydrates are bad. And that’s just too simple.”

To a degree, a high-protein/low-carb diet like Atkins’ is simple, which is probably part of the attraction. It works like this: The general rule for losing weight involves taking fewer calories into your body than your body’s putting out for energy. High-protein diets achieve this by eliminating the most obvious source of calories: carbohydrates. And high-protein foods naturally fill us up for longer periods of time, thus drastically lowering our calorie intake. We eat less. Put another way, it’s not the fat of cheese and meat that makes us fat but rather the carbohydrates of bread and pasta, of which we consume too much. This argument, in its proper, scientifically complex context, is lately being treated with more and more curiosity and (after 30 long years) respect. Of course Nashvillians, like the growing number of Atkins Dieters across the country, just like to see their bodies getting thinner. And they are.

“I’m not a dieting type of guy,” says Scott Loft, a local sales executive, “but Atkins made the most sense to me because I could basically eat meat all day every day.” Loft, who spent three to four months on the diet, lost 23 pounds. “It was tough for the first couple of weeks, but after that I felt great.”

Cory Mason, general manager of Nashville’s Morton’s of Chicago Steakhouse, suspects the diet may play a role, however small, in his restaurant’s business over the last couple of years. “To be honest, no one really comes up to me and says, ‘I’m on the Atkins Diet,’ but business has been very good, so something’s working.” In fact, Mason says, some of Nashville’s healthiest specimens go to Morton’s to load up on high-quality protein. “I see a lot of hockey players, both Predators and out-of-towners. And with the visiting teams, even though the game is played several blocks away, they find us.”

There are regular visits from Titans, and there is annual mayhem after the Music City Marathon. “People call weeks and months in advance for seatings after the marathon,” Mason says. “We go from putting out 10 to 12 48-ouncers”—Morton’s biggest steak, roughly the size in diameter of a small-to-medium-sized solid beef pizza—“to having to at least double our stock for one Saturday night.”

Of course, world-class and endurance athletes are, for the most part, not the constituents for diet plans. True, the Music City Marathon athletes run the gamut of human shapes and sizes, but then you don’t have to be perfectly shaped to be in good shape. More to the point, most diets are made for the average person, the non-marathoners—the vast majority of Americans, according to virtually all recent reports. And when you’re dealing with that many people, as any diet guru will tell you, you’re not going to be able to satisfy everyone.

“Honestly, I think [the Atkins Diet] is a horrible thing to do to your body,” says one twentysomething Nashvillian who prefers to keep her dieting, as most do, on the down-low. “I did it for a month, and I felt groggy the entire time, and just not right. I lost 2 or 3 pounds, but the more I read of Atkins’ book, the more I felt like he thinks he’s the only one in the world who’s right. The whole thing’s very creepy.”

Creepy indeed. And then there are those for whom the diet has yet to perform its magic. “I can’t blame anyone but myself,” says Loft, who fairly quickly regained 14 of the 23 pounds he’d lost on the diet. “I just got sick of it, and I didn’t keep up with my exercising. But that’s my fault. I will absolutely go back to it one of these days.”

As one might expect, those who bravely keep up with the (rather dry) reading believe the answer lies somewhere in the middle. “Basically, the Atkins-style protein diets need more fruit and carbohydrates to balance them out, and the food pyramid needs more fiber and fish,” says Gurchiek, the dietitian. “So where’s the truth? It’s in some of all of that.”

Whitney Kemper, the Nashville Strider, takes this view one step further—in fact, he goes so far as to take Atkins’ view one step further: “To me, they’re all trends. As far as I’m concerned, you can swallow a steak, pour A-1 sauce down your throat and shove chips into your mouth all day long as long as you burn more calories than you take in. Then you lose weight.” Kemper pauses for maybe a millisecond and then continues: “I still think the food pyramid works, but then I also like meat and ice cream and beer. What it comes down to is that most runners run because they like to eat with impunity.”

In fact, exercise is the one common factor in any failed diet, whether it’s high-protein/low-carb or high-carb/low-cal. Both Gurchiek and VanHooydonk point to the new bike paths sprouting up and around Nashville as positive signs in this direction. And then there’s the increasingly popular marathon, the effects of which have yet to be measured. (The theory is that the race will prompt a whole slew of new runners each year simply because of human nature—“Wait a second, my fat ass of a neighbor is running a marathon? If he can do it....” And so on.)

Unfortunately, for some of us the daily diet available in Nashville does take its toll. But not because of what the town’s lacking—several dietitians point to new (and old) restaurants and lunch spots that emphasize salads, fish and, if you like, high-quality meats. No, it’s more because some of Nashville’s tastier traditions (the ones we all know deep in our hearts simply have got to have consequences) are still available. Sandy VanHooydonk, a close observer of Nashville diet trends, puts it best: “It’s encouraging to see, for instance, some of the lake fish becoming popular with Tennesseans. But then the fish are always fried.”