Atkins diet questions

I tried it, and had some initial success, but found it very hard to maintain. When I screwed up and ate something I was craving, I crashed hard and couldn't seem to get back on for some reason. I also had problems with extreme light-headed / dizzy spells while exercising, which seems to be a common issue with the low-carb diets.

Some people love it, but it wasn't really a viable option for me.

Atkins is a great diet for people who don't really like fruit and veggies. When I did it I LOVED getting to make some of the recipes. For example you take a large chicken breast, pound it out, cook it in butter and add cream cheese and herbs before you roll it up. Also, this is a really easy diet if you eat out a lot. You can always get shrimp, chicken, steak and you don't have to worry about how much oil they are cooked in.

If you use products like sugar free ketchup and sugar free jams you will not lose as much weight. The whole point is you are restricting cals by not eating certain foods and eating smaller portions because you get tired of what you are eating. If I put myself on a diet where I eat nothing but rice I'd imagine I could lose weight too.

When I did it I got really sick because I wasn't eating enough vitamins.

I say do south beach, its much friendlier

www.reddit.com/r/keto

it can be hard to maintain if you go back to your old eating habits (which i did)
but you should be thinking of it as a new lifestyle, not a short term fix.

its so easy to lose weight on it.. and most people are generally healthier. (according to blood work)

i definitely eat more vegetables now, so whoever was spouting nonsense, just ignore them :P

i mainly like it because i don't have much of an appetite on it, and i don't crave carbs anymore (after the initial week)

I am following a low carb plan. I don't want to say I follow Atkins exactly but that is always my plan. I LOVE carbs and find that when I try to count calories I tend to eat way too many carbs and then my blood sugar crashes. Plus my cravings become out of control. It is really scary when the blood sugar drops happen in public. But this happens every single time I start counting calories.

On low carb it doesn't happen to me at all. So I feel a HUNDRED times better eating low carb. I really have to remind myself to eat my vegetables so I try to eat a big salad at lunch and then a couple servings of vegetables with dinner. At first I was trying to count calories, keep my fats low and watch carbs and I did that for awhile with NO success before I realized I NEEDED the fats and calories in order for the low carb to work. It's made it so much easier. I have never read the book cover to cover but I think when you follow atkins like it is supposed to be followed it's a very healthy way of eating.

As far as being weak or dizzy. I do tend to get that way when I first start on low carb. Some people call it the "atkins flu" but it goes away after a few days. Then you feel really good (or at least I do).

With all this said, I do not lose weight quickly on low carb at all. I'm lucky to lose 1 pound a week. I have a very slow metabolism so I do this diet more for how it makes me feel rather than to lose weight quickly.

Feel free to add me as a friend if decide to do low carb and want support.

LOW CARB DIETS BURN THE MOST CALORIES

Lauren Cox
MyHealthNewsDaily

"Burn more calories than you eat" remains the golden rule of weight loss, but a new study finds that the human body burns calories more efficiently while on certain diets than on others.

Researchers found that overweight people burned 350 more calories a day, on average, when they ate a low-carbohydrate diet, than when they ate a low-fat diet.

"That's an amount equal to one hour of moderate physical activity, without lifting a finger," said Dr. David S. Ludwig, lead author of the study to be published June 27 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
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The researchers also found that people burned 150 more calories more a day when they ate a diet of low-glycemic index foods, when compared with a low-fat diet.

The findings show that "from a metabolic perspective, all calories are not alike," said Ludwig, who researches obesity prevention at Children's Hospital Boston. "The quality of the calories going in affects the number of the calories going out."

Not all calories are created equal?
Ludwig and colleagues gave 21 overweight adults three meals a day for seven months. At the study's start, all participants ate the same diet and lost, on average, 14 percent of their body weight.

Then, to maintain their weight loss, participants were assigned to monthlong trials of three popular diets. One diet consisted of low-fat foods, another was based on the Atkins approach of cutting out carbs, and the third diet focused on foods that rated low on the glycemic index (for example, complex- carbohydrate foods such as brown bread and oatmeal, instead of white bread or white rice).

People's diets can change more than the numbers on the scale, so the researchers ran tests for markers of heart disease and diabetes risk, along with calculating participants' metabolic rates.

On the low-carb diet, people burned the most calories but also experienced increased stress hormones and inflammation. "Both of those are key heart disease risk factors," Ludwig said.

Meanwhile, people on the low-fat diet experienced the most negative consequences regarding insulin resistance, lipid levels and HDL (or good) cholesterol.

"The low glycemic index diet gives you many of the same [calorie burning] advantages of the low-carb diet without any of the extremes," Ludwig said. But the researchers noted this diet included more fat than the recommendations endorsed by many doctor groups.

An apple a day?
Low-fat diets were championed by doctors for decades, until the Atkins diet shook up the medical field, said Dr. Kevin Niswender, an associate professor at the Vanderbilt School of Medicine. Heart experts worried that the low-carbohydrate Atkins meals left too much room for high-fat foods, which would lead to clogged arteries.
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"In the early days, it was just heresy," Niswender said of the Atkins diet. But "there are now a number of pretty decent studies showing that you can get weight loss with a moderately high-fat diet."

Niswender said a one-month trial of a diet is too little time to make diet recommendations. Yet he added that doctors need tightly controlled experiments such as the one by Ludwig and colleagues.

"People are very variable, so to be able to measure the same thing, in the same diet, is a good design," Niswender said.

Ludwig said he hopes to compare the three diets in larger groups of participants, for a longer period of time. But for now, his practical advice is to balance healthy fats and carbs: Cook vegetables in oil, sprinkle a little cheese on broccoli, put some avocado in your burrito.

"Ultimately there shouldn't be a conflict between biology and behavior," Ludwig said.