There arc a few principles I need you to understand in ruder to put Atkins into action. Let's start with a couple of definitions. First, a calorie is simply a unit of energy—precisely the amount of heat needed to raise I gram of water I degree Celsius at sea level.
Second, metabolism is the sum of the physical and chemical processes by which food is transformed into energy.
Now let's move on to some concepts and misconceptions.
Don't Excess Calories Cause Weight Gain ?
It is true that gaining weight results from taking in more calories than you expend. But excess calories certainly cause you to pile on the pounds—and this is a gigantic "but"—-only when you are eating a lot of carbohydrate along with fat.
So it's time to abandon the assumption that the only way to lose weight is to strictly control your intake of calories. Many people think that only one thing matters: how many calories you take in and use up. It's not that simple.
When you follow a controlled carbohydrate approach, you get what I call a "metabolic advantage." When you control carbohydrate consumption sufficiently, your body will switch from burning glucose derived from carbohydrate to burning primarily fat for energy. This means you could eat, say, 2,000 calories and still begin losing pounds and inches.
In contrast, if you were consuming 2,000 calories on a low-fat diet, you might not lose weight, and you might actually gain weight. The metabolic advantage is that burning fat takes more energy so you expend more calories. And if you eat fewer calories—as many Atkins people do because their appetite is usually diminished—you'll likely lose weight even faster. So it's not that calories don't count, it's just that you will burn more of them, with less hunger, when your body is operating on a fat-based metabolism.
When I published the first edition of this book ten years ago, that claim was quite controversial. Today it is galloping into acceptance among scientists who study the human metabolism. Glance through the references listed at the back of this book and you will see the numerous studies and articles published in the past six years. And, we will deal with the metabolic advantage in greater detail in Chapter 7.
Eating the Atkins Way Must Have Special Advantages
You bet it does. Here are six reasons why doing Atkins works:
1. As I've just said, it mobilizes more fat for use as energy than any diet you have ever encountered. In a clinical setting and countless testimonials, Atkins has repeatedly been proven to take off more fat than other programs when an. equal number of calories is consumed. This incredible advantage has been researched and validated.
2.The controlled carbohydrate nutritional approach is not one of deprivation. Sheer hunger is the main reason for the failure of most weight loss efforts. A life-time eating plan needs to be palatable, pleasant and filling. You will have to abandon sugar and other refined carbohydrates such as white flour. But most people find that once they shake off the sugar addiction, they feel no strong desire to go back to it. For them, a nutritional approach that allows, them to eat a vast variety of meat and fish and salads and vegetables prepared in the most appetizing manner—-i.e., with butter and cream and spices and—is anything but austere. Eating Atkins-style is a food lover's dream come true—luxurious, healthy and varied.
3. Atkins is the easiest way to maintain weight loss. The trouble with losing weight on a low-calorie/low-fat diet or on a liquid-protein diet is that the maintenance program is so very different from the weight loss program. So when you go back to your former way of eating, the pounds return with astonishing speed because you are unprepared for maintenance.
There are sound physiological reasons for this. When you restrict the number of calories you eat, your metabolism shifts into a survival mode, meaning it slows down to conserve energy. When you go back to a higher-calorie diet—-as you inevitably must—your body is still in its mode of burning calories slowly. So it becomes extremely hard to continue or maintain weight loss.
Success at maintaining weight loss is the great plus while doing Atkins. What most people know about it is that you can usually lose a lot of weight rapidly. And you probably can. But the key point is that the weight doesn't return. One of the reasons is that it doesn't create a big difference in the number of calories you during the weight loss and weight maintenance phases.
The Atkins Nutritional Approach is actually a continuum of four phases that transition seamiessly from one to the next. Phase 1, known as Induction, crashes you through most weight loss barriers and will generally introduce even the most metabolically resistant person to weight reduction. Phase 2, Ongoing Weight Loss (OWL), will carry you smoothly toward your goal. Phase 3, Pre-Maintenance, eases you toward adopting permanently a new, healthier way of eating that, with a modest degree of diligence on your pan, will allow you to stay slim forever. Phase 4, Lifetime Maintenance, is the game plan that will keep those banished pounds at bay for the rest of your days.
Let me state one crucial fact that you should always keep in mind: For people who comply with all four phases of Atkins, failure to maintain weight loss is very rare.
4.Not only does Atkins not deprive you of the pleasure of eating, it energizes you and makes you feel just plain good. And those two things are definitely factors in keeping the weight off, because few people are willing to go back to feeling lousy once they've experienced the joys of feeling good. As a matter of fact, for about half the patients I see, the most compelling reason they continue to do Atkins is that they feel noticeably worse if they stop the program.
Plus, when you are full of energy, you are more inclined to exercise, enhancing weight loss and replacing fat tissue with muscle, which will also help you cut inches from your measurements. People will see the change in you, enhancing your sense of accomplishment and self-respect.
5.The plan is healthy. Research has repeatedly demonstrated that controlling carbohydrnte intake results in improved blood cholesterol and triglyceride levels, moderation of blood-sugar levels and reduction of blood pressure. All these indicators result in reduced risk for cardiovascular disease. And, incidentally, in my forty years of practice, I've yet to see a single study that has shown that a high-protein diet causes kidney problems.
In addition, Atkins can effectively and quickly make a positive impact on many of the most common annoyances that patients reveal in the privacy of their doctor's office. In all my years of practice, I've heard and seen it all: fatigue, irritability, depression, trouble concentrating, headaches, insomnia, dizziness, joint and muscle aches, heartburn, colitis, premenstrual syndrome, water retention and bloating. For the lion's share of patients, Atkins is a specific prescription against such ills.
6. Atkins works because, as an increasing body of scientific evidence shows, it corrects the basic factor that controls obesity and influences risk factors for certain illnesses. That factor is excessive levels of insulin. An essential hormone, insulin governs the basic mechanism by which the body lays on fat. When found in excessively high levels—we medical folk call that state hyperinsulinism—insulin vigorously promotes the development of diabetes, athetosclerosis and hypertension. More recently, it has also been linked to increased risk of breast cancer and polycystic ovarian syndrome.
And so the Atkins approach finds itself at the center of health planning for a long and vigorous life.
What's Wrong With Carbohydrates?
If you mean what's wrong with a spear of broccoli or a bunch of spinach, the answer is nothing, they're magnificent foods. When I speak negatively of carbohydrates, I'm referring to the unhealthy one—those lurking in tie sugar bowl and the bin of white flour, along with milk, white rice and processed and refined foods of all kinds. I also must include concentrates, such as fruit juices.
During the weight loss phase of Atkins, even your intake of potentially healthy carbohydrates such as fruits and whole grains must be controlled. Once you've bid adieu to your extra pounds, you can return to fruits and some starches to the degree that they won't upset your metabolism and reactivate the cravings that result in weight gain. But the refined and processed foods rye just mentioned simply aren't good for you—-ever.
Am I advocating a high-fat diet? Not in the long run. As you increase the percentage of carbohydrates, while advancing through the different phases of Atkins, the percentage and actual amount of fat you consume will diminish. However, as long as you are at the lower end of carbohydrate consumption, higher-fat consumption poses no threat to your health.
A Short History Lesson
Let me assure you that eating meat, fish and fowl isn't a health hardship—it's what humans have eaten for millions of years. People ate much the same way in the nineteenth century. They were beef and pork eaters and their use of butter and eggs was unrestricted. In fact, the two most widely consumed fats of all were lard and beef tallow.
In the crucial sixty-year time span between 1910 and 1970, when coronary heart disease escalated from a yet-to-be-recognized problem to the killer of more than half the population, this is what happened to America's diet: The intake of animal fat and butter actually dropped a little, while the intake of cholesterol was not changed. Meanwhile, the intake of refined carbohydrates (mainly sugar, corn syrup and white flour) escalated by sixty percent? (See the graphs on page 27.)
To understand how the human diet in most of the world's developed countries has changed so drastically in the last century, let's take a short historical detour. Even before the onset of agriculture, the human animal was able, for millions of years, to remain strong and healthy in conditions of often savage deprivation by eating the fish and animals that scampered and swam around him, and the fruits and vegetables and berries that grew nearby. Without medicine, without expertise, without insulated housing or reliable heating, our species nonetheless survived. The fact that the dietary side of our primitive lifestyle was enormously healthy undoubtedly helped us.
So what has caused the avalanche of degenerative diseases that now threaten the health of our species? Two hundred years ago the average person ate less than 10 pounds of sugar a year, and white flour was used much less commonly. About a hundred and ten years ago the lid blew off the sugar canister. In the 1890s, the craze for cola beverages swept the nation—-which means that when we were thirsty and craved water, we got sugar as well. To make matters worse, the mills that could refine wheat into white, nutritionally barren flour were developed in the same decade.
That was bad enough. But what's worse, once that flour met up with sweetness and saltiness, the junk food industry was off and running.
The Perils of Sugar
The net result was that sugar intake, which had averaged 12 pounds a year per person in 1828, was nearly ten times that in 1928. Remember, too, that if you don't take your sugar straight, you'll find it already sprinkled into a thousand different foods and beverages before they come to your table.
There are marked similarities in the diet eaten in all the world's developed countries, so, for now, I'll just mention some statistics for the United States. Once you understand what healthy eating can be like, you'll find them as bizarre and shocking as I do.
The latest Department of Agriculture statistics show that the average American consumed 124 pounds of caloric sweeteners (principally refined sugar and high fructose corn syrup) in 19757 By 1999 it had risen to 158 pounds. This translates into an average of nearly 750 calories from sugar a day, which means by conservative reckoning, over one-third of all the calories an adult puts into his or her body each day comes from nutritionally empty and metabolically harmful caloric sweeteners. Those figures represent 190 grams of sugar (and corn syrup) a day. Compare that with the 300 grams of carbohydrate the government expects us to consume each day, and we see that sugar now comprises over sixty percent of the carbohydrate total.
Sugar has no nutritional value and is directly harmful to your health. Despite vociferous attempts to defend it, there are studies that clearly show how harmful (and even deadly in the case of diabetics) its effects can be. I won't go into hyperinsulinism now; it will be covered fully in Chapter 5. For now, simply remember this: Diets high in sugar and other refined carbohydrates radically increase the body's production of insulin, and insulin is the best single index of adiposity. That final word is medical jargon for fat.
Sugar, you see, activates certain metabolic processes that are both harmful to your health and folly for your waistline. Sugar is a metabolic poison. You could, of course, ignore this fact and attempt to control your weight by calorie counting and deprivation. That is, you could direct yourself to the quantity instead of the quality of your diet. That's pretty much what conventional diets advise. However, the likelihood that You'll permanently lose weight by controlling your caloric intake is almost nil.
The whole problem of sugar was compounded by the low-fat messages we were wrongly bombarded with during the 1980s and 1990s. To make a low-fat product taste good, manufacturers add lots of sugar. Now, in the United States, the aisles in the supermarket are crammed with low-fat or diet cookies and crackers, ice cream, frozen cakes and pies, soft drinks and white bread filled with sugar. The United States has "low-fatted" and "dieted" itself to a raging epidemic of obesity and diabetes.
This is not real food; it's invented, fake food. It's filled with sugar and highly refined carbohydrates and with chemically altered trans fats (they are listed as hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oil on food labels), not to mention plenty of other chemical additives. For thousands of years,
Vive la Difference!
A look at another Western culture is instructive. Only a few decades ago, the Frenchman with his butter- cheese and goose-liver-pate-laden diet had a heart disease rate sixty percent lower than his American peers? (The Frenchwoman did even better—she had the lowest heart disease rate in the western world.) The French also have far lower rates of obesity than Americans do, despite the fact that their diet is higher in fat. They eat comparable amounts of meat and fish, four times the butter and twice as much cheese as Americans. What does it all mean? Could it by any chance have anything to do with the fact that the per capita consumption of sugar in the United States was five times that of France?
By the way, the reason it's more helpful to compare American and French diets of a few decades ago is that the French have now discovered fast food. As their diets become closer to American ones, they are losing some of their health advantage. human beings were in luck—none of this food existed. Now we're stuck with it. Because it's incredibly profitable, it's also widely distributed. But there isn't a person on this planet who should be eating it.
What Are We to Do?
If you want to be slim and vigorous, you can't eat as I've described. But you can cat the natural, healthy unrefined animal and vegetable foods that people ate and grew robust on in centuries past. Nor do you have to eat like a rabbit; you can eat like a human being. You can enjoy fish, Iamb, steak and lobster, nuts and berries, cheese, eggs and butter along with a wonderful variety of salad greens and other vegetables.
In fact, in the ten years since the first edition of this book was published, one of my personal wishes has been granted. Today, a person choosing to follow .a controlled carbohydram nutritional approach has almost as many packaged and prepared food options as people who are, unwittingly, following a low-fat diet. Visit your local natural food store, drug store, supermarket or even mass market store and you will see the wide variety of food products available to someone who understands the benefits of controlled carbohydrate nutrition. Advances in scientific understanding have paved the way for alternatives to foods that are high in carbohydrates, foods such as pasta, bread, muffins, cakes, candy and
Changes in How We Eat
Look at the correlation between the decline in fat consumption and the increase in carbohydrate consumption.The pendulum began to swing toward fat restriction in 1975, and for the next twenty years, Americans began to gain weight at an. alarming rate (see the following graphs).
Number of States in Which 35% or More of Adults Are Overweight
Source: Enns, C. W., et al. Trends in Food and Nutrient Intakes by Adults: NFC$ 1977-78, CSFII 1989-91, and CSFII 1994-95, Family Economics and Nutrition Review 10(4) 1997. even ice cream, not to mention the wide variety of energy bars and ready-to-drink shakes.
On all four phases of Atkins, you select from an increasingly liberal array of foods that are sources of the healthy carbohydrates. Your overall intake of them also gradually increases. Once you've reached your goal weight, you can eat larger helpings of healthy carbohydrate foods, as long as you stay below the Critical Carbohydrate Level for Maintename (CCLM), which will be explained in Chapters 16 and 17. In simple terms, this means !mowing and adhering to a threshold of carbohydrate intake that allows you to neither gain nor lose weight. It's worth mentioning that each person has an individual threshold depending upon age, level of physical activity and other factors. Common sense dictates that when a lot of people try the same answer to the same' problem and most of them fail, there's something wrong with their solution. You may have tried a low-fat diet. I'm sure you've seen other people try one. After a promising start' they often end up as failures. Only people with remarkable self-discipline or those who really don't get pleasure from eating are likely to succeed on Low-fat diets. Atkins represents a completely different way. When you do Atkins, you eliminate virtually all refined sugar and flour and processed foods. Instead, you're in an affiance with Mother Nature, who really did provide for us very well. You bought this book to lose weight, and I'm going to have to make you healthier, too. When doing Atkins, you couldn't separate those results, even if you wanted to.
KEY POINTS!
·It is not true that the only way to Jose weight is to limit your intake of calories.
·When you control carbohydrate consumption sufficiently, your body will switch from burning glucose, derived from carbohydrate, to burning primarily fat as its energy source.
·You burn more calories when your body is operating on a fat metabolism.
·Atkins has repeatedly been proven to take off more fat than other weight loss programs when an equal number of calories is consumed.
·By drastically increasing the intake of carbohydrate, the American diet has changed dramatically in the past sixty years.
·In the past twenty years the incidence of lifestylerelated diseases such as obesity, diabetes and heart disease has increased by leaps and hounds.
A FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION:
Is it true that the Atkins Nutrittomd Appnoach is really just another low-calorie diet?
Some people think this, but it's not true. Atkins isn't about counting calories. Those who are doing Atkins may be eating fewer calories as a result of being less hungry and less obsessed with food.
This occurs for two reasons:
1.Stable blood sugar throughout the day ensures that you will have fewer food rovings or false hunger pains.
2.The food eaten by a person doing Atkins (meat, fish, cheese, nuts, eggs, Low-sugar/low-starch vegetables and fruit is less processed and more nutritious than the typical pre-Atkins menu. Give a body fewer empty calories, provide it with more nutrient-dense alternafives, and the body will logically be satisfied sooner and require less food.
TIPS:
·Eliminate from your kitchen sugar and all products that contain sugar.
·When grocery shopping, stick to the aisles on the perimeters of the store. The center aisles are where the junk food and processed food lurk.
·Look for—and purchase the ever-increasing selection of controlled carbohydrate food alternatives to low-fat, high-sugar foods.
·Use a carbohydrate gram counter—such as the one bound into this book—to count carbs.
·Even if you are not trying to lose weight, avoid the typical high-carb breakfast choices such as toast, muffins, bagels and cereal.