Many people have heard of the Atkins diet, the short name for Atkins nutritional approach.  It’s a low-carb diet created by Robert Atkins.  He put on a lot of pounds while he attended medical school.  A medical Journal had an article about a diet.  He built on that diet and eventually made it popular.

Dr. Atkins had rather radical theories about the nature of weight gain as expressed in the Atkins diet.  First, he dismissed the idea that saturated fats were bad.  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.  He pointed to all the low-fat foods that were high in carbohydrates.  That meant people on a diet often ate foods that were worse than they normally ate. 

The Atkins diet changes this.  He shifts dieters’ metabolism to burn body fats by cutting out carbohydrates from their diets.  That’s the goal of weight loss.  It’s not just a matter of eating less.  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.

The Atkins diet also could help people with type 2 diabetes..  Type 2 diabetes is most often associated with obesity.  So in general any diet that helps decrease weight will help address 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 are the specific rules of the Atkins diet?  It consists of four steps or phases which are induction, ongoing weight loss, pre-maintenance and lifetime maintenance.  Here is an overview of the most important phase – Induction.

As the first phase, Induction is the most crucial and most restrictive portion of the Atkins diet.  Atkins is flexible as to the time period – but recommends two weeks.  Carbohydrates are nearly removed entirely from the diet, only 15-20 grams can be consumed each day.  The lack of carbohydrates will prompt the body to convert fat into fatty acids for fuel – a process known as ketosis.  Weight loss during this phase can be extreme – some Atkins followers reported losses of 5-10 pounds a week.

The other Atkins diet phases are generally used for determining the levels of carbohydrates ideal for losing weight and for maintaining a standard weight – not gaining weight.  Dr. Atkins himself died of complications of increased fat intake in his diet, which is something to keep in mind when choosing this diet.

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