The Atkins Diet is designed to help you lose weight by limiting your carbohydrate intake, especially refined carbohydrates and sugar, while increasing low-carbohydrate vegetables and proteins. Atkins is meant to be a long term commitment to diet and lifestyle change. The program may be used until you reach your goal weight, but has long-term success if you continue to limit carbs to those that are high in fiber and low on the glycemic index. This program's success rate differs with everyone and is determined by how much weight you personally need to lose, how faithful you are to the diet, and how long you are on it.
Phase One: Induction
The first phase of the Atkins Diet is called induction. This is the time where you will lose the most weight - up to fifteen pounds in the first two weeks. The objectives of phase one are to jump-start your weight loss and to shift into burning primarily fat for energy. This phase is meant to take two weeks but if you are not losing any weight then you need to focus on induction until you lose more than two pounds and your body shifts to burning primarily fat. However, if you are losing weight easily, you can move onto the second phase.
Phase Two: Ongoing Weight Loss
The second phase of the Atkins Diet is called ongoing weight loss and will most likely determine how your permanent diet will go. In phase two you will begin to gradually incorporate carbohydrates back into your diet as time progresses and you continue to lose weight. During ongoing weight loss, you can expect to keep losing weight, but not as much as you did in the induction phase. By the end of phase two you should be just over ten pounds away from your goal weight and can then move on to phase three.
Phase Three: Pre-Maintenance
The third phase of the Atkins Diet is called pre-maintenance. By now you have probably figured out your carbohydrate tolerance but you should continue testing it with a wider variety of foods. Whatever your goal weight might be, pre-maintenance is the phase where you lose your last ten pounds. By this time, depending on how much weight you wanted to lose and how long you have been on the diet, you could have lost anywhere from a few pounds to nearly two hundred pounds as some people have done with Atkins.
Phase Four: Lifetime Maintenance
The fourth and last phase of the Atkins Diet is called lifetime maintenance. This is when you have lost all the weight you wanted to lose and continue with the basic Atkins plan as you commit to remaining at your goal weight. This does not mean completely replacing carbohydrates with protein and fat but simply limiting carbs to the number you can eat each day without gaining back weight. Be sure to make adjustments as needed and stay active for at least 20 minutes every day.
Member Comments