The popular name for the ‘Atkins Nutritional Approach’ is the ‘Atkins Diet’, which was the brainchild of Doctor Robert Atkins. Dr. Atkins had put on a lot of surplus weight while he was studying in medical school and after coming across a new diet in the medical journal, he made up his mind to refine it and publish it as his own.

Atkins, in his Atkins diet book, stated that he was sure that the prevailing theories about weight gain were terribly wrong. First, he dismissed the idea that saturated fats were bad for weight loss; instead he said it was it was the carbohydrates that caused the weight problems Americans have these days. Atkins declared that on the contrary, our obsession with avoiding fat actually aggravated the problem. He pointed out that the low-fat diet foods on the market were high in carbohydrates but were not helping the nation, which probably meant that people on a ‘normal’ diet often ate foods that were worse for them than what they had been eating before.

The Atkins diet shifted the focus. Atkins said that by cutting out carbohydrates, people would burn stored body fats. And if you lose the fat, you lose the weight. He said it was not just a matter of eating less. Dr. Atkins held that your diet could actually help you burn calories. The Atkins diet supposedly burned more calories than were consumed everyday. But the claims were contested.

Dr. Atkins also touted the positive influence that his diet could have on suffers of type 2 diabetes. Type 1 diabetes is a disease you get early in life, but type 2 is often closely associated with diet and surplus body weight. So, it should follow that any diet that helps reduce weight, will help people with Type 2 diabetes. The Atkins diet is low in carbohydrates, which ought to be avoided with type 2 diabetes regardless of the caloric intake, so because of this aspect of the diet, Atkins claimed that those who suffer type 2 diabetes would no longer need medication such as insulin. In general, doctors disagree with Atkins on this point, although they do agree, however, that a lower carbohydrate intake helps control Type 2 diabetes, but there is no proof that carbohydrates cause diabetes.

What are the procedures one has to follow to do the Atkins diet? It goes in four phases - Induction; On-Going Weight loss; Pre-maintenance; and Lifetime Maintenance. Here follows a brief precis of the most important phase - The Induction Phase.

The Induction phase is probably the most difficult of the phases in the Atkins diet. Atkins is rather flexible about how long it should last ” but recommends two weeks. During this time, carbohydrate consumption should be severely curtailed ” up to 20 grammes per day. The idea is to enter a fat burning metabolic process called ‘ketosis’ which is when the body, being starved of glucose, begins to convert previously stored fat into the fatty acids needed to power the body. Weight loss during this period is often extreme ” some Atkins dieters report losses of 5-10 lbs. a week or more.

The purposes of the final three phases in the Atkins diet are to learn the ideal carbohydrate levels for the next two phases, which are continued weight loss and weight maintenance. Many millions of people are still losing the weight they want to on the Atkins Diet ” but beware the risks of taking in too much cholesterol and fat.

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