Is Atkins Diet As Effective As People Think?
The short name for the Atkins nutritional approach is the Atkins diet. It’s a low-carb diet created by Robert Atkins. He put on a lot of pounds while he attended medical school. Atkins read about a low-carb diet in one of his medical journals. He decided to improve it and release it under his name.
Atkins Grapefruit Diet
Atkins, in his Atkins Diet, believed prevailing theories about weight gain were all wrong. He held that saturated fats weren’t as bad as people claim. The carbohydrates are the culprits. Atkins held that our obsession with fat actually worsened the problem. He pointed to all the low-fat foods that were high in carbohydrates. Dieters were being tricked into eating foods that would cause them to gain more weight.
This all changes in the Atkins diet. He shifts dieters’ metabolism to burn body fats by cutting out carbohydrates from their diets. That’s the goal of weight loss. Atkins flipped the equation from lowering caloric intake. The diet would work because it burned calories. The Atkins diet supposedly burned an extra 950 calories everyday. But the claims were not true.
Healthcare
In addition to claims of weight loss, Dr. Atkins said his Atkins diet 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. So in general any diet that helps decrease weight will help address 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 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? Induction, ongoing weight loss, pre-maintenance and lifetime maintenance are the four necessary phases of the diet. The details of the induction phase is as follows.
South Beach Diet Recipes
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. Millions of people are still losing weight on this diet – but beware the dangers of taking in too much fat.
