I was meeting my friend Ron for breakfast in the diner at Lexington and 33rd.
And all the meat, eggs, cheese, butter and fish the dieter could manage to keep down.
Dr. Robert Atkins had controversial medical views - but was an undisputed genius for diet promotion.
They were the ones with the faint aroma of Jimmy Dean pork sausage on their breath.
And they always wanted to tell you how much weight they were losing while eating giant slabs of beefsteak every night.
"I'll probably have a bacon cheeseburger for lunch," I remember Ron confiding at breakfast that morning.
He was happy about that, I know, although he did gain the pounds back - and more - by Christmas.
With hardly any fanfare, the people who control the Atkins diet have suddenly abandoned their famous meat-gorging, bread-shunning eating plan.
Instead of Atkins' familiar "net carbs" system for measuring food, they've introduced an Atkins "glycemic index," an approach that seeks to gauge the body's blood-sugar response to food.
Diet irony alert: This glycemic index sounds awfully like the weight-loss plan popularized by one of Atkins' chief competitors, the Zone diet.
Robert Atkins and "The Zone" author Dr. Barry Sears clashed frequently at medical conferences and in media interviews, scoffing at each other's philosophies.
"We see this as the standard and the next generation for measuring net carb and blood sugar impact," Matthew Wiant, Atkins' chief marketing officer, told Reuters this week.
"I knew Bob very well," Sears said yesterday from a medical conference in San Diego.
But since Bob is no longer there to maintain his vision, people at Atkins Nutritionals are putting their finger in the wind and saying, 'Which way is it blowing now?'"