I have decided to put aside questions of my fragile ego and include this page for those of you who, as I did,
may have come to conclude that any hope of weight loss is an impossible dream.
The Atkins diet may not work for everyone, but it has certainly worked for me.
If weight loss poses a problem for you, I would recommend strongly you give it a two-week trial run,
and see if it doesn't work for you as well.

I credit my friend, Judy, for giving me hope that something could actually work for me, and for getting me started on the Atkins diet. She has lost more than 100 pounds on this plan - a whole person worth! Generally, when I started a diet - any diet - I gained weight.
I actually gained fifteen pounds on the Slim-Fast plan!

Thanks, Judy!

Mention the Atkins diet, and most people conjure up an image of austerity in limits that boggle the mind.
Give up sugar, starches, pasta and bread forever?
The truth is, they are confusing the first two weeks of the diet with a lifetime of eating habits.

I began my Atkins diet --- after a lifetime of watching my weight escalate from 123 pounds when I married on August 15, 1969
to a whopping 235 pounds thirty-one years later --- on September 4, 2000. After twelve months on this plan, I  lost 63 pounds.
More importantly to my ego, I  lost six inches from my bust, ten inches from my waist, and twelve inches from my hips.

-Robert C. Atkins, M.D., Dr. Atkins New Diet Revolution (Avon Books, New York, New York, 1992), p. 15

"Most of the overweight people in the world are carbohydrate sensitive --- often they're true carbohydrate addicts. They need a metabolic solution, not a low-fat one.
They've struggled and struggled with low-calorie/low-fat diets and consistently failed."

-Ibid., p. 16

Amen.

The Atkins diet is really four diets:

"A low-carbohydrate diet is not austere. Sheer hunger is behind most diet failure.
A lifetime diet needs to be palatable, pleasant, and filling.
The major austerity on this diet is the abandonment of sugar and such refined carbohydrates as white flour.
But most people find that, once they shake off the sugar addiction, they feel no desire to go back to it.
For them, a diet on which they can eat an almost limitless variety of meat and fish and salads and vegetables
prepared in the most appetizing manner (i.e. with butter and cream and spices and herbs to taste) is anything but austere.
The Atkins diet is a dream diet --- luxurious, sane, healthy, and varied."

- Ibid., p.18

"What's wrong with carbohydrates? If you mean what's wrong with a spear of broccoli or a bunch of spinach, the answer is nearly nothing, they're magnificent foods. I'm referring to the unhealthy ones --- sugar and white flour, milk and white rice, processed and refined foods of all kinds, junk foods and the like."

When I thought about beginning this diet plan, I knew which foods I could not eat.
For the life of me, though, I couldn't figure out what was left to me.
After all, I was thinking of eliminating my favorite foods, the very staples of my diet -
sugar, flour, potatoes, rice, corn, pasta and milk.
What is left, I soon found, is meat, eggs, cheese, butter, salads, some vegetables -
in short, more than enough to leave me feeling full.
I discovered strange, fun things about the plan.
For instance, I can have whipped cream, but not milk.
I found developing a taste for diet soda was not as difficult as I thought.
I learned that bottled water comes in delicious flavors.
I have been less successful in convincing myself to incorporate in practice what I know to be true -
that pure water is the healthiest beverage. I have high hopes of doing that yet…

- Ibid., p. 45

"Let me assure you that eating meat, fish, and fowl isn't a health hardship ---
it's what the human carnivore has eaten for millions of years."

- Ibid., p.56

"In the absence of carbohydrates, the body has no choice
but to burn its own fat."

- Ibid., p. 107

"What shall I eat?

"The answer is always the same: Eat as much as you want of the permitted foods. If you've spent a whole lifetime plagued by food cravings --- usually, I know, straightforward carbohydrate cravings --- then the pleasant truth is that hunger isn't going to occupy as much of your time and thought. Oh, yes, you'll still have an appetite, and you'll still eat with pleasure and delight, but the days
of obsession are on the way to being past. What a joy not to always be hungry and always be tired and always be searching for some satisfying physical solution that you've never been able to reach. That's the lifestyle of the carbohydrate addict, which so many of you are, and it's a profoundly exhausting and irritable lifestyle that you'll be eternally happy to be rid of."

"You can't afford to be fat and unhealthy --- it's as simple as that.
This is a path that will cure you; for many of you, it will be the only path."

"Since much of the desire for carbohydrate food is metabolic addiction, once the path
of renunciation is completed, the desire for the old goodies is really very small."

"Interestingly enough, the majority of people on the ketogenic/lipolytic diet feel better
even before weight loss mounts up to more than a handful of pounds."

"… when the final tally is made, 80% of all diabetics are obese. Some studies have suggested that,
if you're significantly overweight, your chances of becoming diabetic will be one in two."

"I'd like to remind you yet again that there are people who still can't accustom themselves to this diet because they can't get past the primitive, popular notion that a diet is something you get on and then get off, as you would a bus. But a diet is not an excursion, and such dieters --- the uncommitted ones --- are often the very individuals who need to lose forty pounds but lose interest when they reach twenty-eight. Then they go back to eating their old diet and four or five months later they're back
to where they were to begin with."

- Ibid., p. 210

"Whatever your ideal weight was, you can almost certainly reach it again.
120? 140? 170?  Why not go for it?

"Obesity is almost always a metabolic problem, and to be specific,
the metabolic disturbance is hyperinsulinism."

-Ibid., pp.244-5

"Naturally, you're thinking, 'Why did I promise that I would never have that food again?
I'm no longer willing to keep that promise.' Must always be always and never be never?

This important question has several answers. In one answer, I ask you to consider the plight of a recovering alcoholic.
Most of us realize that when an addiction such as alcoholism is the problem, it is far far better that never really be never.
So if your proposed carbohydrate deviation involves something you're addicted to,
I sadly must give that never-never advice."

I delayed my progress for several months by noticing that I could occasionally indulge my passion
for ice cream, cake, candy, and chocolate in all its glorious forms and still lose weight.
Once I finally admitted my total addiction to sugar and renounced it once and for all
(which regrettably didn't happen until July 11, 2001!), I was able to experience acceleration
not only in pounds and inches lost, but also in boosts in energy and self-esteem.

Do yourself a favor. Visit the web sites. Call the number. Buy the book.
But by all means, try it.

Want more validation?  How's this?

By DANIEL Q. HANEY, AP Medical Editor

CHICAGO - Multitudes swear by the high-fat, low-carbohydrate Atkins diet, and now a carefully controlled study backs them up: Low-carbohydrate diets may actually take off more weight than low-fat diets and may be surprisingly better for cholesterol, too.

United Press International
From the National Desk
Published 4/17/2003 1:14 PM
 

NEW YORK, April 15 (UPI) -- Dr. Robert Atkins, the diet guru of low-carb, high-protein fame, died Thursday at Cornell University Medical Center from injuries received earlier this month when he fell.

Atkins, 72, was on his daily walk to work when he fell on an icy sidewalk outside his New York City office and suffered injuries to his head. A spring snowstorm coupled with icy temperatures had left city streets and sidewalks slippery.

Dr. Keith Berkowitz, a colleague at The Atkins Center, rushed Atkins to Cornell where he underwent surgery. However, Atkins remained in a coma and on life support while family and friends waited at his bedside. His physicians gave him little chance to recover.

On the Atkins Center Web site, his family kept his fans up-to-date on his condition.

"It makes me proud that my husband has touched so many lives and having this reaffirmed at this time is very much helping me through this terrible ordeal," said his wife, Veronica.

The founder of the Atkins Diet had been a controversial figure in the world of nutrition and dieting. But in the last few years, he had begun to see many in medicine and some in research come around to the theory he had been advocating for the last 30 years.

A graduate of the University of Michigan and Cornell University Medical College, he dropped his cardiology practice to open a obesity clinic after he tried what he described as an effortless diet cutting carbohydrates and increasing protein and fat.

Atkins turned the diet industry on its head when he released his first of eight diet books in 1972. "Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution" called for a diet high in meat, fat, eggs and cheese while cutting out bread, rice and fruit.

The American Medical Association called the diet "naive" and "potentially dangerous."

Atkins was advocating a diet high in protein and fat, even saturated fat, at the same time the medical community was calling for less meat, less saturated fat and fewer eggs to prevent heart disease and stroke.

At a time when people started knowing their cholesterol number as well as their phone number and counting the fat grams in their food, the diet went against everything nutritionists advocated -- cutting meat to cut cholesterol and therefore reduce the chance of heart disease.

Nonetheless, the Atkins book was a best-seller and sold in the millions.

Meanwhile, a high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet was officially advocated by the U.S. government after it released its Food Pyramid that called for using fats, oils and sweets sparingly while consuming 6 to 11 servings of bread, cereal, rice and pasta.

Through the years, Atkins brought more recipes and foods into the maintenance diet that were carbohydrates, but used less sugar and white flour.

However, despite the initial panning of his diet from the medical community, Atkins continued to refine his diet and became the founder and director of the Atkins Center for Complementary Medicine in New York City.

In 1992 Marilyn Rosenthal, in a blurb on Atkin's latest book, wrote in Publishers Weekly that: "Atkins repeats his controversial, questionably valid premise that the elimination of carbohydrates from the diet will result in weight loss, good health, and euphoria. Contrary to current thinking, Atkins promotes a diet of protein and fat in four stages: induction, ongoing weight loss, premaintenance, and maintenance."

The diet targets insulin, the hormone that regulates blood sugar levels. According to Atkins, the bodies of most overeaters are continually in a state of hyperinsulinism; their bodies are so adept at releasing insulin to help convert excess carbohydrates to fat that there's always too much of the hormone circulating through the body.

"This puts the body into a bind; it always wants to store fat. Even when people with hyperinsulinism try to lose weight -- especially when they cut fat but increase carbohydrate consumption -- their efforts will fail," Atkins said.

Atkins maintained that a high-protein, high-fat diet was healthful as long as it was not coupled with high carbohydrates.

In the first phase of the diet, two weeks or longer, carbohydrates are almost entirely eliminated from the diet.

Once the dieter is within eight pounds of the target weight, "healthy" carbohydrates and starches, such as fruit and nuts, are slowly added until the daily consumption of carbohydrates causes the person to neither lose nor gain weight.

However, in the last 20 years as Americans adopted a more carbohydrate-heavy diet -- according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture annual grain consumption increased almost 60 pounds per person -- so did their weight.

Despite more and more dieting, 60 percent of Americans were classified as overweight and obese at the turn of the 21st century. Meanwhile Atkins and the people who claimed to lose "a ton" on his diet did not go away.

Researchers that had spurned the Atkins diet in the 1970s started doing studies on his diet in the late 1990s and early 2000s, some to finally disprove Atkins, and some funded by his foundation. Many of the results were surprising.

In five studies, cholesterol levels improved, but triglyceride levels were considerably lower with the Atkins diet, suggesting that heart-disease risk could actually be reduced when fat is added back into the diet and starches and refined carbohydrates are removed, The New York Times reported in July 2002.

However, none of the studies was financed by the National Institutes of Health, and none had been published.

The Times quoted Linda Stern, an internist at the Philadelphia Veterans Administration Hospital: "As a trained physician, I was trained to mock anything like the Atkins diet, but I put myself on the diet. I did great. And I thought maybe this is something I can offer my patients."

Despite the growing evidence, many are still worried that eating a lot of bacon and eggs will clog their arteries.

However, after years of refusing to research comparative popular diets, the National Institutes of Health has funded a five-year study trial of the Atkins diet with 360 obese individuals.

In a few years, there may be some more answers in the debate between the high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet and the high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet.

Copyright © 2001-2003 United Press International
 

"The joy is that we can take back our bodies, reclaim our health, and restore ourselves to balance. We can take power over what and how we eat. We can rejuvenate and recharge ourselves, bringing healing to the wounds we carry inside us, and bringing to fuller life the wonderful person that each of us can be."

- John Robbins

Don't you believe it!!!