The Atkins diet craze is over, so now the Atkins folks are adopting the Zone diet

• 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?'"