The Atkins Diet program claims it will "turn your body into a fat-burning machine." It maintains that to enhance metabolism, the proper foods must be consumed to convert food into energy. Training your body to use fats for energy not only burns the body's fat stores, it also stabilizes the amount of insulin in the blood. This is done by decreasing the amount of carbs consumed and keeping the carbs eaten rich in fiber.
History
Dr. Robert C. Atkins founded the Atkins Weight Loss Program in 1968 while working with an organization called Perma-Slim. The diet was aimed at a weight-loss therapy group, explains the website FoodandWeightLoss.com. The original diet was high in protein, rich in fat and low in carbohydrates. It was poorly received by the medical community, and still has many critics. Over the decades, the diet has been revised to include more healthy fats and carbohydrates rich in fiber. The Food and Weight Loss site notes that the diet has spawned numerous other diet plans over the years, including the Zone Diet, the Complete Scarsdale Diet, the Beverly Hills Diet Plan and the South Beach Diet.
Diet Basics
The Atkins Diet has always promoted low-carbohydrate consumption and a diet rich in proteins. The premise behind the diet is that the body will first use the starch and sugars in foods you eat for energy before it uses fat. These starches and sugars are converted into glucose with the help of insulin, to be used as energy. This process causes insulin fluctuations in the blood and may lead to weight gain. Atkins states that by limiting carbohydrates and eating ones that are high in fiber, the body is forced to burn fats first, before the carbs. This also helps keep insulin levels static.
Features
The most recent version of the Atkins Diet promotes a new way of counting your daily amount of carbs, now called net carbs, which takes into account the amount of fiber in foods. Atkins claims that high-fiber carbs may be high in carbohydrate grams, but the fiber is not readily absorbed, so it is expelled naturally by the body. The fiber is not counted in the net amount of daily consumable carbohydrates. After the restrictive first-two-week stage of the diet, more and more high-fiber carbohydrate foods may be added.
Benefits
Atkins notes that by maintaining a balance of carbohydrates, fats and proteins, the body's cravings for sugar and starch may decrease. The diet may also give you a boost in energy. A 2007 study cited by Stanford University shows that in a comparison of the Atkins, Zone, LEARN and Ornish diets, the Atkins group lost more weight over 12 months and had larger decreases in triglycerides, body mass and blood pressure. In addition, the HDL, or good cholesterol, increased more in the Atkins group than the other groups.
Expert Insight
Much controversy remains as to the pros and cons of the Atkins Diet. Researchers of the 2007 study at Stanford University admit skepticism, but the results of the study show that the Atkins Diet was the easiest to follow. Researchers noted that positive effects of a low-carb diet included the omission of refined carbohydrates and that health problems were no better or worse than in the other diets studied. FoodandWeightLoss.com believes that the Atkins Diet is a good eating plan for people who need to lose a lot of weight quickly, but the diet is difficult to maintain over the long run.
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