Atkins Diet Basics

The short name for the ’Atkins Nutritional Approach’ is the ’Atkins Diet’, which was the invention of Doctor Robert Atkins. Dr. Atkins had put on a lot of excess weight while he was studying in medical school and after reading about a certain diet in the medical journal, he decided to improve it and publish it under his own name.

Atkins, in his Atkins diet book, wrote that he was sure that the prevailing theories about weight gain were terribly wrong. First, he mocked the idea that saturated fats were bad for weight loss; instead he said it was it was the carbohydrates that led to the weight problems Americans have these days. Atkins declared that on the contrary, our obsession with avoiding fat actually aggravated the problem. He pointed out that the low-fat diet foods on the market were high in carbohydrates but were not helping the nation, which probably meant that people on a ’normal’ diet often ate foods that were worse for them than what they had been eating before.

The Atkins diet shifted the focus. Atkins said that by cutting out carbohydrates, people would burn stored body fats. And, of course, if you lose the fat, you lose the weight. He said it was not just a question of eating less. Atkins postulated that your diet could actually help you burn calories and The Atkins Diet supposedly burned more calories than were consumed everyday. But the claims were contested.

Dr. Atkins also promulgated the positive influence that his diet should have on suffers of Type 2 diabetes. Type 1 diabetes is a disease you usually get early in life, but Type 2 is more often closely associated with diet and excess body weight. Therefore, it should follow that any diet that helps decrease weight, will help people with Type 2 diabetes. The Atkins diet is low in carbohydrates, which must be avoided by those with Type 2 diabetes regardless of the caloric intake, which the Atkins diet does, so Atkins claimed that those who suffer Type 2 diabetes would no longer need medication such as insulin. Doctors do not agree with Atkins on this point, although they do agree, that a lower carbohydrate intake helps control Type 2 diabetes, but there is no proof that carbohydrates cause diabetes.

What are the steps one has to take to follow the Atkins diet? It is followed in four phases – Induction; On-Going Weight loss, Pre-maintenance and Lifetime Maintenance. Here is an overview of the most important phase – The Induction Phase.

The Induction phase is the most difficult of the phases in the Atkins diet. Atkins is flexible about how long it should last ” but recommends it lasts for two weeks. During this phase, carbohydrate consumption is severely curtailed ” you can only eat up to 20 grammes per day. The idea is to enter a fat burning metabolic phase called ’ketosis’ wherein the body, starved of glucose, starts to convert stored fat into the fatty acids needed to power the body. Weight loss during this phase is often extreme ” some Atkins dieters reported losses of 5-10 pounds a week or more.

The goals of the final three phases in the Atkins diet are to learn the ideal carbohydrate levels for the next two phases, which are continued weight loss and weight maintenance. Many millions of people are still losing the weight they want to on the Atkins Diet ” but be aware of the risks of consuming in too much cholesterol and fat.

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