The Atkins Diet
Another highly popular diet that has been around for many years now is The Atkins Diet. When it first burst onto the weight loss scene, it was hailed as a miracle diet and many users lost weight and proclaimed it to be the best diet ever.
Well, the diet was very successful to begin with, but before too long cracks began to appear in its veneer or perfection. This article takes a look at the diet and why it was so sucessful and also why it had its share of opposers.
What is The Atkins Diet
The basic idea of this diet is that the body will burn fat to produce the much needed energy demanded by the muscles when you omit carbohydrates from your food. This was a fairly simple precept and one which seemed to work very well, at least in the short term.
The body does indeed switch from burning sugars normally derived from carbohydrates to metabolizing the body's fat store when that source of energy is withheld from the diet. However, people soon got tired of only eating protein and fat based foods and the diet fell down when they began to re-introduce carbohydreates to their diet. The body switched back to burning the sugars from teh carbs while storing fat again. This meant that the weight originally lost soon came back on and no long lasting benefits were gained.
Better diet education was needed to really make this diet a success in the longer term. With the re-introduction of carbohydrates, this should have been done combined with an exercise program designed to continue burning as much energy as possible to prevent the body from storing the re-introduced source of sugars.
For all its failings, the Atkins Diet can still be used in the shorter term to cause weight loss as long as it is realized that exercise is also needed to provide long term benefits.
