Sunday, January 18, 2009

Atkins Diet Things You need To Know

By Ron George

The short name for the Atkins nutritional approach is the Atkins diet. 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 perfected it and released it to the public.

Dr. Atkins came up with new ideas, his Atkins diet, about the nature of weight gain. He disagreed that saturated fats were the problem. Instead it was carbohydrates that led to the weight problems Americans have. In Atkins theory eating too little fat make things even worse. He pointed to all the low-fat foods that were high in carbohydrates. Eating a low-fat version of foods was actually less healthy.

The Atkins diet shifts the focus. Once Carbohydrates were removed from a diet, people would burn more stored body fat. Lose the fat lose the weight. It's not just a matter of eating less. Now it was all about what your diet can help you burn. The Atkins diet supposedly burned an extra 950 calories everyday. But the claims were not true.

In addition to claims of weight loss, Dr. Atkins said his Atkins diet 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.

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 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.

So just how does this Atkins diet work? It follows four phases - induction, ongoing weight loss, pre-maintenance and lifetime maintenance. 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. It lasts for about two weeks. Carbohydrates are nearly removed entirely from the diet, only 15-20 grams can be consumed each day. 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.

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. The diet lost popularity after Dr. Atkins died, but it's still popular. - 16463

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