Tuesday, December 2, 2008

How Safe Is The Atkins Diet To Use For Fast Fat Loss?

By Christine G. Shannon

When you begin to wonder about the Atkins diet, you wonder who Atkins was. Atkins is actually doctor Robert Atkins. He was an overweight physician who read a diet in the Journal of the American Medical Association and revised it to suit his needs. He wrote a series of diet books about his success back in the 1970's.

The Atkins diet is a low carbohydrate high protein diet. The Adkins food list may include such items as, unprocessed meats that include pork, lamb, beef, veal, mutton, ham, venison and sugar free bacon. It also includes poultry such as chicken, duck, goose and quail as well as unprocessed fish such as tuna, trout and catfish. You can also eat unprocessed shellfish like clams, oysters and shrimp.

Fats and some dairy products are accepted, you mainly are watching carbohydrates, which the body converts to sugar and stores as fat. Because most fruits contain natural sugar, these are restricted except for unsweetened berries, cherries and grapefruit. You have to watch salad dressings and condiments, normally sugar free are fine. The same is true of beverages and sweeteners. Basically, anything containing sugar or carbohydrates that can be converted to sugar are restricted on the Atkins diet.

Atkins has come out with prepackaged food, shakes and other items to go with this diet, if you can afford it. The 14-day starter kit is to help learn what is allowed on the Atkins diet. The main problem with this diet is, to be successful, it involves a lot of research, reading books and labels of carbohydrate gram counts, and can take a while to figure out what is low carb and what isn't.

With the Adkins diet you do not count calories rather you count carbohydrates. The diet involves various stages or phases. The first is the induction phase. In this phase you severely restrict your consumption of many foods. After passing into the next phase you can slowly but surely begin to add more carbohydrates back into your diet plan.

There are online support, chat groups, recipes, menus and frequently asked questions from the Atkins diet support team. Of course, it also involves gaining the support of those around you, as well.

This diet does seem to work for a lot of people who want to shift extra pounds but the Atkins diet is not for everyone. If you have tried the Atkins diet already and either not lost any weight or put back on all the weight you did lose, it might be time to try another diet.

No matter which diet you may chose to use the hardest aspect is maintaining a healthy weight. That means keeping it off. This is especially true when you already have a predisposition to be overweight. The only means to success when it comes to maintaining your weight loss is by simply committing yourself to actively changing your habits of eating and your lifestyle. Fat Loss 4 Idiots at the link below may be just what you are searching for. - 15343

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