Healthy Weight Loss Diet

Find Some New Atkins Diet Tips

The short name for the Atkins nutritional approach is the Atkins diet. It was the brainchild of the doctor named Robert Atkins. He had gained a lot of weight in medical school. He read about this diet in the medical journal. He built on that diet and eventually made it popular.

Dr. Atkins came up with new ideas, his Atkins diet, about the nature of weight gain. He disagreed that saturated fats were the problem. Carbohydrates, found in potatoes, and breads, were the real problem. Atkins held that our obsession with fat actually worsened the problem. 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 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. That sounded good but it wasn’t true.

Dr. Atkins also touted the positive influence this Atkins diet could have on 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. 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. 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 are more details of Induction which is the most crucial of the phases.

The first phase of the Atkins diet, Induction, is like the boot camp for the diet. Atkins is flexible as to the time period – but recommends 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. 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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