Many people have heard of the Atkins diet, the short name for Atkins nutritional approach. Dr. Robert Atkins invented this low-carb diet. He had gained a lot of weight in 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. First, he dismissed the idea that saturated fats were bad. Carbohydrates, found in potatoes, and breads, were the real problem. In Atkins theory eating too little fat make things even 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 shifts the focus. Once Carbohydrates were removed from a diet, people would burn more stored body fat. Once the fat was burned, the pounds will follow. Atkins flipped the equation from lowering caloric intake. The diet would work because it burned calories. 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. Therefore, by means of losing weight a person on the Atkins diet would be addressing their type 2 diabetes.
But the Atkins diet is also low in carbohydrates, which must be avoided with type 2 diabetes regardless of caloric intake, so by means of this aspect of the diet Atkins claimed those who suffer type 2 diabetes would no longer need medication such as insulin. The jury is still out in the medical world as to the causes of type 2 diabetes. So while science agrees with Atkins that lowering intake of Carbohydrates will help with the disease, it would disagree that the step alone would remove the necessity for medicine.
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. 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. This phase should be followed for a period of two weeks. During this phase carbohydrates are severely limited only up to 20 grams per day.
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. The diet lost popularity after Dr. Atkins died, but it’s still popular.
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