The Atkins diet is really called the Atkins nutritional approach. It\’s a low-carb diet created by Robert Atkins. He had gained a lot of weight in medical school. Atkins read about a low-carb diet in one of his medical journals. He perfected it and released it to the public.
Dr. Atkins came up with new ideas, his Atkins diet, about the nature of weight gain. 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. Many low-fat foods are packed with carbohydrates. That meant people on a diet often ate foods that were worse than they normally ate.
This all changes in the Atkins diet. He shifts dieters\’ metabolism to burn body fats by cutting out carbohydrates from their diets. Lose the fat lose the weight. It\’s not just a matter of eating less. Dr. Atkins held that your diet could actually help you burn calories. The Atkins diet supposedly burned an extra 950 calories everyday. 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. Type 2 diabetes is most often associated with obesity. 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.
So just how does this Atkins diet work? It follows four phases – induction, ongoing weight loss, pre-maintenance and lifetime maintenance. Here are more details of Induction which is the most crucial of the phases.
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. 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. Millions of people are still losing weight on this diet – but beware the dangers of taking in too much fat.
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