The Atkins Diet promises you weight loss without being hungry, without having low carbohydrates and no starving in your diet plan. You’ll not only lose a huge amount of fat, but you’ll also lead to a good heart health, memory function and some other benefits as well.
What is the theory?
The diet is based on a theory that over weight people has too much carbohydrate in their daily diet. Our body burns both the fats as well as the carbohydrates for energy. By reducing carbohydrates intake and eating more protein and fats, the body will naturally lose weight by burning stored fat other than the carbohydrates which are normally used by the body to burn fat more efficiently.
Four Phases of Atkins Diet
Atkin diet weight loss
Induction
Followed by at least two weeks, this phase can be gone longer if you have the strength to bear it! During this phase, you must restrict your carbohydrate intake at a tiny 20g a day (while most of us have that intake of almost 250g a day). It means this phase requires you to cut away foods like biscuits, cakes, chocolates, chips, fizzy drinks, pastries, pizzas, burgers, potatoes, pasta, rice, milk, fruits and many vegetables from your diet. Apart from that, you’ll be having a wide range of foods like red meat, fish, eggs, mayo, cream and chicken.
Ongoing Weight Loss
The second phase requires you to take a little more intake of carbohydrates (may be 5g a day) for a week at a time. This is the maximum amount of carbohydrate that you can take per day to lose 1-3lbs of your weight a week. This phase also allows us to introduce once again to few more veggies, fruits, nuts and seeds. Bread, potatoes, rice and milk and pizza etc are still not allowed here in this phase of Atkins Diet.
Pre-maintenance
Once you’ve just 5-10lbs left to lose, it means it’s your time to enter the phase 3 of the Atkins Diet. In this phase, your carb intake increases 10g a day for a week at a time. The objective of this phase is to slow down your weight loss to 1lb a week to prepare your body for the final phase. But now, you can include tiny amounts of foods like pizza, porridge, bread, and paste. Make sure to take that amount as much that it just gives you 10g of carbs.
Lifetime maintenance
The fourth phase helps you to maintain your weight. There’s a problem with lots of us that we can reduce weight by exercise and workouts but we’re not able to maintain that weight after we’ve quit the weight loss program. It requires a little varied carbohydrates intake (usually people are allowed a maximum of 90g a day) which is still almost one-third of the intake we take on regular basis. The result: you’ll be sticking yourself to a low carb diet for the whole life.
Claims
Dr. Atkins claims you to lose 6-10lb in the first two weeks of the induction phase, which would slow down to 1-3lbs weight loss per week in the next phase. In the maintenance phase, you’ll expect a maximum of 1lb weight loss a week.
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