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 built on that diet and eventually made it popular.
Atkins Grapefruit Diet
Dr. Atkins had rather radical theories about the nature of weight gain as expressed in the Atkins diet. He disagreed that saturated fats were the problem. Instead it was carbohydrates that led to the weight problems Americans have. Atkins held that our obsession with fat actually worsened the problem. 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.
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 later reviews of his studies found that his claims were false.
Healthcare
The Atkins diet also could help people with type 2 diabetes.. Type 2 diabetes is most often associated with obesity. 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 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? It consists of four steps or phases which are induction, ongoing weight loss, pre-maintenance and lifetime maintenance. Here is an overview of the most important phase – Induction.
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The first phase of the Atkins diet, Induction, is like the boot camp for the 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. Weight loss during this phase can be extreme – some Atkins followers reported losses of 5-10 pounds a week.
The next three phases of the Atkins diet help establish the levels of carbs people can consume in order to lose weight and to maintain a desired weight. Dr. Atkins himself died of complications of increased fat intake in his diet, which is something to keep in mind when choosing this diet.
