Atkins Diet

What is the Atkins Diet?

This diet believes in limiting the amount of carbohydrates in a person’s diet so that the person can lose weight. It also claims that trans-fats are harmful and saturated-fat are over taked about as being bad. Things that you are allowed to eat are:

• Meat

• 40g to 90g of unrefined carbohydrates

The things that you are not allowed are processed foods, trans fat and more than 20 grams of refined carbohydrates. The benefit with the Atkins diet is that it gives you fast results based on some studies. It prevents one from heart disease as well. It restricts consuming fruits, vegetables and whole grains which contain phytochemicals. However over 45% of people dropped out before achieving weight loss. There are four phases in the Atkins diet.

The first is the induction phase which imposes the most restriction of the things to consume for dieting. Basically, caffeine, alcohol and processed foods are prohibited.

The second phase if the ongoing weight loss, which happens after the second week where the dieter slowly increases their carbohydrate intake.

The third phase is pre-maintenance. The purpose in this phase is to find the threshold with the amount of carbohydrates consumed by the dieter so that they don’t result in weight gain.

The fourth phase is called Lifetime Maintenance where the dieter tries to keep up with the routine. With this diet you can expect a weight loss of 12 lbs with most of the weight loss occurring in the first two weeks.