Atkins Diet

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 had gained a lot of weight in medical school. He read about this diet in the medical journal. 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. First, he dismissed the idea that saturated fats were bad. Carbohydrates, found in potatoes, and breads, were the real problem. 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. Dieters were being tricked into eating foods that would cause them to gain more weight.

The Atkins diet changes this. By cutting out carbohydrates people would burn stored body fats. Lose the fat lose the weight. The goal wasn’t necessarily to take in fewer calories. Now it was all about what your diet can help you burn. In fact Atkins cited a study that claimed the body would burn an extra 950 calories on his diet. That sounded good but it wasn’t true.

In addition to claims of weight loss, Dr. Atkins said his Atkins diet could help people with type 2 diabetes. Being overweight is generally considered the major cause for type 2 diabetes. 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. 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? It follows four phases – induction, ongoing weight loss, pre-maintenance and lifetime maintenance. The details of the induction phase is as follows.

The Induction phase is the most difficult phase of the Atkins diet. It lasts for about two weeks. During induction the dieter can consume only about 20 grams of carbohydrates on a day to day basis. The goal is to enter a fat burning metabolic phase called ketosis when the body, starved of glucose, will begin converting stored fat into fatty acids needed to power the body. 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.

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