Is The Dr Atkins Diet Safe?
The Atkins diet is really called the Atkins nutritional approach. It was the brainchild of the doctor named Robert Atkins. He put on a lot of pounds while he attended medical school. He read about this diet in the medical journal. He decided to improve it and release it under his name.
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Dr. Atkins came up with new ideas, his Atkins diet, about the nature of weight gain. He disagreed that saturated fats were the problem. Carbohydrates, found in potatoes, and breads, were the real problem. In fact Atkins thought that the focus on fats had made a problem much worse. Many low-fat foods are packed with carbohydrates. That meant people on a diet often ate foods that were worse than they normally ate.
This all changes in the Atkins diet. By cutting out carbohydrates people would burn stored body fats. Lose the fat lose the weight. 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 the claims were not true.
Healthcare
Dr. Atkins also touted the positive influence this Atkins diet could have on people with type 2 diabetes. As opposed to type 1 diabetes, type 2 is often closely associated with diet and people who weigh too much. Therefore, by means of losing weight a person on the Atkins diet would be addressing their 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. 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.
What are the specific rules of the Atkins diet? Induction, ongoing weight loss, pre-maintenance and lifetime maintenance are the four necessary phases of the diet. Here is an overview of the most important phase – Induction.
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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 induction the dieter can consume only about 20 grams of carbohydrates on a day to day basis. 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. 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. The diet lost popularity after Dr. Atkins died, but it’s still popular.
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