Get Back Into Your Skinny Jeans

The short name for the Atkins nutritional approach is the Atkins diet. It’s a low-carb diet created by Robert Atkins. He had gained a great deal of weight while he attended medical school. A medical Journal had an article about a diet. He decided to improve it and release it under his name.

Dr. Atkins had rather radical theories about the nature of weight gain as expressed in the Atkins diet. He held that saturated fats weren’t as bad as people claim. Carbohydrates, found in potatoes, and breads, were the real problem. Atkins held that our obsession with fat actually worsened the problem. Many low-fat foods are packed with carbohydrates. Eating a low-fat version of foods was actually less healthy.

This all changes in the Atkins diet. He shifts dieters’ metabolism to burn body fats by cutting out carbohydrates from their diets. Once the fat was burned, the pounds will follow. The goal wasn’t necessarily to take in fewer calories. Dr. Atkins held that your diet could actually help you burn calories. Dr. Atkins claimed that his diet would result in the body burning an extra 950 calories each day. 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. As opposed to type 1 diabetes, type 2 is often closely associated with diet and people who weigh too much. Weight loss associated with the Atkins diet, as with any diet, would therefore help people manage type 2 diabetes. In addition the Atkins diet also addresses the measure of taking in fewer carbohydrates which is part of managing type 2 diabetes, so that Dr. Atkins suggested people on his diet would no longer need to monitor their blood sugar or take insulin. The medical world, in general, disagrees with Atkins on this point. They agree lower carbohydrates help with type 2 diabetes, but there is no proof that carbohydrates cause the disease.

What are the specific rules of 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.

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. During this phase weight loss can reach as much as 10 pounds per 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. Dr. Atkins himself died of complications of increased fat intake in his diet, which is something to keep in mind when choosing this diet.