Atkins Diet
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 great deal of weight while he attended medical school. Atkins read about a low-carb diet in one of his medical journals. He built on that diet and eventually made it popular.
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 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 changes this. 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. The diet would work because it burned calories. The Atkins diet supposedly burned an extra 950 calories everyday. But the claims were not true.
The Atkins diet also 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. 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.
So just how does this Atkins diet work? Induction, ongoing weight loss, pre-maintenance and lifetime maintenance are the four necessary phases of the diet. 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. 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 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.
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.
