The Atkins Diet- What is it?

The Atkins diet was created by cardiologist Dr. Robert Atkins. It didn't take long for the entire world to adapt to this new fad. But is it just a fad? Or could it be something that you might be able to benefit from?

I have tried the Atkins diet myself, and while I started losing weight on it, I don't think it was for me. Not that I couldn't do the whole low carb thing, but it just got a little to pricey for me. I do feel though, this diet can help you lose weight, while teaching you how to change your daily eating habits. Which is the key to losing weight and keeping it off.

The Atkins diet is basically a low carb diet with phases. During Phase one, you have a short list of food items that you can have. You basically eliminate every carb for two weeks here. It has been said now, that phase one is not a must, but an option now. However, I feel if your gonna do it, then do it right. So phase one you can not have any carbs. There is a list of items that you can have. Let me warn you now, that list is not all that large. I'm sure you can handle it for two weeks.

Once you have completed phase one, you will then move on to the next phase. Over a period of time, this diet slowly introduces carbs back into your daily eating habits. While doing this, it teaches you portion control. You can have carbs, just small amounts. This is also a good thing to learn. Remember, once you lose the weight, you have to know how to keep it off. So learning how to change your lifestyle of eating is key.

By eliminating the most of the carbs in your daily intake, your body will learn how to use other things, such as fat cells for energy. Thus, you start losing weight, because your body is using up everything that you have ate that day, and also some left over fat in your body.

For me, when I first started this diet, I was pretty tired. When you go from eating a lot of carbs daily, to eating none, it is gonna mess with you a little bit. So don't worry, if this happens to you, it will pass. In my personal opinion, I feel this diet is a really good diet, I just don't think its the one for me. It may or may not be the right one for you.

Tips for your Low Calorie Diet

Eating small frequent meals is something that you should be doing while your on your low calorie diet. You don't want to feel like your starving all the time. Having this feeling is not going to help you lose weight. You are just setting yourself up for a huge fall here. If your starving, chances are your body is also thinking that its starving. Meaning, your body is going to go into starvation mode. So everything you place into your mouth is going to be stored into fat and wont be turned into energy as it should be. In order for you to lose weight, you need the food going into your body, turned into energy, so you can in turn burn off the extra fat. Now you may have lost some weight in your first few days of this, but its not going to continue this way. It will take your body a few days to realize whats going on, and when it does, it wont be pretty. Eating 5-6 small frequent meals a day is the way to go. You must do this every day, so your body will know its going to be fed when its hungry.

Watching what you eat and reading nutritional facts are very important. Don't eat something that is high in calories, because then you wont have enough calories to eat the rest of the day. Choose foods that are lower in carbs, sugar and calories. Eating fruits, vegetables, lean meats and whole grain are the way to go. While some whole grain and still have a higher amount of carbs, these are what we call good carbs. These will turn into energy and not store into fat.
Pre Plan your food. Once I started to watch what I was eating and changing my eating habit's, it started getting hard to eat 1200 calories. This coming from someone who could have easily ate 3000 a day and not even thought twice about it. So then I started to pre plan my day. I would write down breakfast, lunch, dinner and two snacks. This way, I knew what was going in my mouth already and I didn't go over or under my calories. So pre planning my food really helped me out, and made me keep my body use to a certain amount of food and usually right around the same times.