What is the Atkins diet?
The purpose of the Atkins Diet is to change your eating habits to help you lose weight and keep it off. The Atkins Diet it's a healthy lifelong approach to eating, whether you want to lose weight, boost your energy or help improve certain health problems, such as high blood pressure or metabolic syndrome.
The Atkins diet promotes itself as a long-term, low-carbohydrate eating plan for weight loss and maintenance. This diet emphasizes eating protein, fat, and low-starch vegetables. Simple carbohydrates, such as flour and sugar, are highly restricted or eliminated altogether.
The Atkins diet is a high-protein, high-fat, and low-carbohydrate diet. By restricting carbs, dieters are told they can drop considerable amounts of weight without giving up foods they enjoy.
The main dietary focus of the Atkins Diet is eating the right balance of carbohydrates, protein and fats for optimal weight loss and health. According to the Atkins Diet, obesity and related health problems, such as type 2 diabetes and heart disease, are the fault of the typical low-fat, high-carbohydrate American diet. The Atkins Diet says that you don't need to avoid fatty cuts of meat or trim off excess fat. Rather, controlling carbs is what's important.
The Atkins Diet holds that eating too many carbohydrates — especially sugar, white flour and other refined carbs — leads to blood sugar imbalances, weight gain and cardiovascular problems. To that end, the Atkins Diet restricts carbohydrates and encourages eating more protein and fat. However, the Atkins Diet says it is not a high-protein diet.
How it works
There are four phases of the Atkins diet:
- Phase 1: Carbohydrates are limited to 20 grams per day. This is where the most dramatic weight loss occurs.
- Phase 2: Carbohydrate intake is slightly increased. Here, dieters can add certain vegetables, berries, nuts, and seeds back into their diet, slightly increasing carb intake without stopping weight loss. This is the longest stage of the diet. You stay here until you are about 10 pounds from your weight loss goal.
- Phase 3: Called “pre-maintenance,” this stage allows you to add 10 grams of carbohydrates to your diet each week, including starchy vegetables and some whole grains. If weight loss stops, you cut carbs again — just enough to maintain a steady weight loss until you reach your goal.
- Phase 4: This is a lifetime maintenance stage with a target carb intake of 45 to 100 grams per day.
