Many people have heard of the Atkins diet, the short name for Atkins nutritional approach. Dr. Robert Atkins invented this low-carb diet. He put on a lot of pounds while he attended medical school. Atkins read about a low-carb diet in one of his medical journals. He decided to improve it and release it under his name.

Atkins Grapefruit Diet
Dr. Atkins came up with new ideas, his Atkins diet, about the nature of weight gain. First, he dismissed the idea that saturated fats were bad. Carbohydrates, found in potatoes, and breads, were the real problem. 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 shifts the focus. By cutting out carbohydrates people would burn stored body fats. Lose the fat lose the weight. Atkins flipped the equation from lowering caloric intake. Now it was all about what your diet can help you burn. Dr. Atkins claimed that his diet would result in the body burning an extra 950 calories each day. But later reviews of his studies found that his claims were false.

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

So just how does this Atkins diet work? It follows four phases - induction, ongoing weight loss, pre-maintenance and lifetime maintenance. The details of the induction phase is as follows.

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As the first phase, Induction is the most crucial and most restrictive portion of the Atkins diet. Atkins is flexible as to the time period – but recommends 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. Dr. Atkins himself died of complications of increased fat intake in his diet, which is something to keep in mind when choosing this diet.