Atkins Diet
The Atkins diet is really called the Atkins nutritional approach. Dr. Robert Atkins invented this low-carb diet. He had gained a great deal of weight while he attended medical school. He read about this diet in the medical journal. He perfected it and released it to the public.
Atkins, in his Atkins Diet, believed prevailing theories about weight gain were all wrong. He held that saturated fats weren’t as bad as people claim. Instead it was carbohydrates that led to the weight problems Americans have. In fact Atkins thought that the focus on fats had made a problem much worse. Carbohydrates are used to make up for the lack of fat in low fat foods. That meant people on a diet often ate foods that were worse than they normally ate.
The Atkins diet shifts the focus. By cutting out carbohydrates people would burn stored body fats. That’s the goal of weight loss. The goal wasn’t necessarily to take in fewer calories. Now it was all about what your diet can help you burn. The Atkins diet supposedly burned an extra 950 calories everyday. But the claims were not true.
In addition to claims of weight loss, Dr. Atkins said his Atkins diet could help people with type 2 diabetes. Type 2 diabetes is most often associated with obesity. Weight loss associated with the Atkins diet, as with any diet, would therefore help people manage type 2 diabetes. Dr. Atkins also said that his Atkins diet would remove the need for medications such as insulin, because it severely cut down on carbohydrates which Atkins claimed were the major cause of type 2 diabetes. But that’s counter to the prevailing medical theories regarding type 2 diabetes which, although recommending that lowered intake of carbohydrates and weight loss help manage diabetes, ascribe no causal relationship between carbohydrates and type 2 diabetes.
What steps does one take to follow the Atkins diet? Induction, ongoing weight loss, pre-maintenance and lifetime maintenance are the four necessary phases of the diet. The details of the induction phase is as follows.
The Induction phase is the most difficult phase of the Atkins diet. This phase should be followed for a period of two weeks. During induction the dieter can consume only about 20 grams of carbohydrates on a day to day basis. The result of this phase should be ketosis, a metabolic reaction by which the body converts stored fat into fatty acids, generally prompted by a lack of glucose. Weight loss during this phase can be extreme – some Atkins followers reported losses of 5-10 pounds a week.
Learning the ideal carbohydrate levels for weight losing and for day to day intake after the weight loss ends are the purposes of the final three phases in the Atkins diet. Millions of people are still losing weight on this diet – but beware the dangers of taking in too much fat.
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