Many of you may be aware that one book has been a world wide best seller or over 10 years from edition to revised edition offering a powerful and effective weight management programme to those who follow it.
It has become known as The Atkins Diet.
We thought it may be beneficial for those intending to try this dietary regime to familiarise themselves with the biochemical facts behind the regime - after all, if you don't believe the hype it may never work for you.
It's all about protein.
>From a nutritional perspective, the body runs on fuel primarily extracted (or metabolised, to used the correct term) from Glucose. Everything we eat eventually breaks down to glucose in the body and different food groups simply take longer than others.
Carbohydrates are by far the easiest and closest metabolisable supplier of glucose and for this reason, carbohydrates are the body's first choice fuel for energy.
Diets high in sugar and refined carbohydrates like bread, pasta, cereal, and other mainly 'low-fat' processed foods increase your body's production of insulin. When insulin is at high levels in the body, the food you eat can get readily converted into body fat, in the form of triglycerides (to top it off, high triglyceride levels in the body are one of the greatest risk factors for heart disease).
Even worse, high carbohydrate meals tend to leave you less satisfied than those that contain adequate fat levels; so you eat more and get hungrier sooner. If you find this hard to believe, think about how much pasta you can eat at lunch and then how hungry you are running to the vending machine for another 'carbo-fix' in the mid-afternoon. If the pasta you ate were really giving your body what it needed, you would stay full until dinnertime. So the typical low-protein, low-fat meal leaves you eating more and hungry sooner.
Second comes dietary fat. Slightly more difficult to break down and relying on a whole host of dietary co-factors to help on it way (one of which, strangely enough is fat itself but as essential fatty acids in a pure nutritional form rather than cooking oils and saturated fats like marg and butter)
Finally comes protein which is more dense and harder to break down than the other two energy sources but does offer a much more sustainable and steady source.
When carbohydrates are removed from the diet, the body loses its primary source of energy and so looks for a secondary source and finds fat - stored body fat or fat from diet.
The Atkins diet plan is based on eating very low amounts of carbohydrates each day, supposedly forcing weight loss to happen very fast because the body is physically metabolising fat to glucose for energy rather than the erratic carbohydrates
The Atkins diet plan makes the claim that it is not really fat calories that makes people gain so much fat, but instead it claims that excess carbohydrates in our daily meals are clearly responsible for making us overweight as a whole, and it claims to make fat loss possible which is why people will lose weight fast using the Atkins diet plan. Therefore, the Atkins diet is focused on eating fewer carbohydrates each day, especially fewer foods rich in white flour or sugar, as those are the worst types of carbohydrates according to this new weight loss program.
The Atkins Diet plan also claims that by eating fewer carbohydrates each day your body will not store as much fat tissue and your body will also go into a fat loss mode where it burns fat tissue all day long, leaving you with improved health and fitness, and makes you able to lose weight fast.
The Atkins diet plan is clearly the most popular low carb diet on the market, with so much media attention given to it all the time. This fat loss program also claims that it is carbohydrates that leave your body feeling even hungrier later in the day, therefore, by eliminating those extra carbohydrates from your meals you will not be as hungry later on which means that you will lose weight and not be struggling with hunger.
However, we have to make clear that this speed of weight loss may come at a price.
There may be significant side effects of following the Atkins diet plan and people need to consider this before beginning this program. First of all, the Atkins diet plan can quickly leave you feeling very weak and miserable in no time at all which forces you to break the fat loss program and eat fattening food. Why does this happen? Simple, because it is the presence of carbohydrates in our meals that gives us most of our energy shortly after eating, and so by following a low carb diet (such as the Atkins diet plan) you will be eliminating quite a bit of energy from your meals and this will leave you feeling weak and hungry, making it hard to lose weight fast.
Also, burning fats in the body for energy can cause bi-products called Ketones. These are very undesirable longterm and can place an immense strain on the Liver and Kidneys.
Finally, high protein diets can make the digestive and associated body systems acid biased.a This is not optimal as overall we are an alkaline animal and our systems run better for it.
Overall, the Atkins Diet offers quick and effective weight loss with some people losing up to a stone over a 2 week period but as we are all bio chemically individual, results can differ dramatically as can the overall effectiveness of the plan and long term side effects
