The Atkins Diet

The Atkins Diet is the latest rage in low carb weight loss plans and is both highly revered and highly criticised in the media. Here we give you an overview of the Atkins Diet from the perspective of its followers & promoters.

What is the Atkins Diet?

A lifetime nutritional philosophy, focusing on the consumption of nutrient-dense, unprocessed foods and vita-nutrient supplementation. The Atkins diet restricts processed/refined carbohydrates (which make up over 50% of many people's diets), such as high-sugar foods, breads, pasta, cereal, and starchy vegetables. Core vita-nutrient supplementation includes a full-spectrum multi-vitamin and an essential oils/fatty acid formula.
A lifetime nutritional philosophy that has been embraced by an estimated 20+ million people worldwide since the release of the book Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution in the 1970s.
The Atkins Diet counts net carbs. Net carbs are the carbohydrate content of food less fibre and certain other carbs such as sugar and alcohols..

The Main Benefits of the Atkins Diet

You'll start to burn fat for energy: Since carbohydrates are the body's primary energy source, you'll rarely use your secondary energy source, you own body fat, for energy unless you restrict carbohydrate consumption. This offers a lifetime of body fat burning, which is the goal of most people trying to lose weight.
You won't feel hungry in between meals: The biggest battle that most people have with weight loss is the constant obsession with food (for example, if you've ever thought about dinner when you're eating lunch). Again, much of this is caused by blood sugar fluctuations that are aggravated by carbohydrate consumption (especially the refined kind). By cutting the carbs, you'll maintain a more even blood sugar level throughout the day. No more false hunger pains or mid-afternoon brain drains.
Your overall health will improve and you'll feel better: Many of the toxins you take into your body are stored in your fat cells. By getting your body to burn stored fat, you allow it to clean itself out. Combined with the benefits of stable blood sugar, the end result is that many common ailments you have been experiencing could well be alleviated. Fatigue, irritability, depression, headaches, and even many forms of joint and muscular pain simply go away. Furthermore, you should see a significant improvement in your blood profile, (including cholesterol and blood pressure levels). All this leads to better health and well-being, something all of us strive to bring into our lives.

Diets high in sugar and refined carbohydrates like bread, pasta, cereal, and other mainly "low-fat" processed foods increase your body's production of insulin. When insulin is at high levels in the body, the food you eat can get readily converted into body fat, in the form of triglycerides (to top it off, high triglyceride levels in the body are one of the greatest risk factors for heart disease).

Even worse, high carbohydrate meals tend to leave you less satisfied than those that contain adequate fat levels; so you eat more and get hungrier sooner. If you find this hard to believe, think about how much pasta you can eat at lunch and then how hungry you are running to the vending machine for another "carbo-fix" in the mid-afternoon. If the pasta you ate was really giving your body what it needed, you would stay full until dinner time. So the typical low-protein, low-fat meal leaves you eating more and hungry sooner.

So what should you do? Get off the insulin generating roller coaster of the low-fat diet and start cutting down on your carbohydrate consumption, especially the worst offenders: sugar, white flour and other refined carbohydrate-based products.

Atkins Diet Recipes and Menu Plans