The Dr Adkins Diet is really called the Atkins nutritional approach. It was the brainchild of the doctor named 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 built on that diet and eventually made it popular.
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. 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. That’s the goal of weight loss and dieting for idiots. 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 later reviews of his studies found that his claims were false. Find out the truth about diets.
In addition to claims of weight loss, Dr. Atkins said his Atkins diet could help people with type 2 diabetes. Being overweight is generally considered the major cause for type 2 diabetes. Therefore, by means of losing weight a person on the Atkins diet would be addressing their 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. 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 consists of four steps or phases which are induction, ongoing weight loss, pre-maintenance and lifetime maintenance. The details of the induction phase is as follows.
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 result of this phase should be ketosis, a metabolic reaction by which the body converts stored fat into fatty acids, generally prompted by a lack of glucose. 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. Dr. Atkins himself died of complications of increased fat intake in his diet, which is something to keep in mind when choosing this diet.
