PART ONE

Why Atkins Works

1 The Promise

Lose weight! Increase energy! Look great! This book will show you how it's done.

Not only that, it will show you how to change your life once and for all.

You hold in your hands a book that has sold more than ten million copies since 1992. Probably two to three times that number of people have followed its teachings. Most of you will have heard people say it's the most effective weight loss plan they've tried. It is!

If you're like many people, you've been through the weight loss wars. Name it and you've probably tried it, whether it's a low-fat diet, a food-combining diet, the grapefruit diet, liquid fasts, other fad diets and on and on. You've learned how to count calories, but ultimately with no success. Even if you lost weight, you were often hungry and always felt deprived. Then when you went back to your old way of eating, those pounds crept back, often joined by a few more.

If this scenario sounds all too familiar, I have a solution that will help end the game of yo-yo dieting once and for all. Instead, I'll help you adopt a permanent way of eating that:

· lets you lose weight without counting calories.

· makes you feel and look better.

· naturally re-energizes you.

· keeps lost pounds off forever with a new lifetime nutritional approach that includes rich, delicious foods.

But in addition to weight loss, there is an even more important benefit: The nutritional approach you'll learn about here is also a revolutionary method for living a long, healthy life. I want my readers to say: "I knew I'd lose weight, but I never realized I would feel so much healthier"

The typical modem American diet or, as I sometimes call it, the high-sugar horrors—makes you fat. In the short term, it's also a sure road to daily misery, making you irritable and fired during the day and sleepless at night. In the long term, it leads grimly on toward heart disease, hypertension, diabetes and a host of other catastrophes.

What I'm going to show you is not just a way to lose weight, but a way to eat for the rest of your life so you can be slim and healthy and stay that way. For too many people, the word diet implies not an approach to eating for a lifetime, but a two-months-on, ten-months-off weight loss game that they play with themselves—-year after year. That is not what this book is about/I believe this so strongly that from now on I'll speak not of the Atkins Diet, but of the Atkins Nutritional Approach or "doing Atkins.” or even just "Atkins." It's a shorthand that others have been using, so I'm going to start using it, too.

The Atkins Nutritional Approach will make you healthy because it is different from the typical American way of eating. Simply put, you avoid the negative consequences of too much carbohydrate intake, all of which can be attributed to too much insulin release in your body.

Would you like to see what I mean? Well, since they say one picture is worth a thousand words, how about two?

The Two Pictures

In the first picture, I am standing behind a huge table heaped with food. My expression is a mixture of pride and anticipation, and no wonder. There are mounds of seeds and nuts, platters of fish, a lobster in drawn butter, well-seasoned fish, turkey and duck and certainly a juicy steak. You'll spy an an omelette that would do any breakfast table proud. There's no lack of variety here. I see vegetables in abundance, fresh green salads drenched in healthy olive oil-based dressing overflowing their bowls, and peeking out through the foliage, blueberries, strawberries and raspberries topped with whipped cream. There's a variety of cheeses. And since this is a picture of the food you'll be eating after you've lost your extra pounds and have reached the Lifetime Maintenance phase of Atkins, you will also notice a glass of wine, panfried sweet potatoes, a platter of melon and slices of peaches and plums. Finally, developments in creating controlled carbohydrate substitute ingredients make it possible to also place a pleasing array of controlled carb bread, cheesecake, ice cream and cookies on the groaning table.

It's a mouthwatering spread, and I'm hovering over it with a hungry eye. To my mind, the food I've just envisioned is quite luxurious. If you believe that weight loss requires self-deprivation, I'm going to insist on teaching you otherwise. I equate healthy eating with gastronomic pleasure and, soon, you will too.

My second picture is of you. I'm very hopeful that it resembles the future you.

The you in this picture I'm conjuring up is finally the weight you've always had as your goal, or fairly close. You feel great—full of energy. Your skin is glowing with health. If you've been exercising, your toned muscles show it. The you in this picture isn't worried about weight loss anymore. You no longer need to spend your time planning the stages of a new diet, constantly concerned about your eating, feeling guilty when you break promises you've made to yourself. After all, you've found a nutritional approach that will last you for a healthy and vigorous lifetime, and it's become so natural you hardly have to think about it anymore. It's second nature.

This is an obvious win-win situation. It offers you the pleasure of eating and the promise of being healthier than before. The major reason for turning it down would be skepticism. "How could anything be so perfect?" you might ask. If that's it, here's my answer: Read this book. When it's all boiled down, what I'm going to show you 'in New Diet Revolution is how to cat what's in the first picture and look just like the second.

Delicious eating and lifetime health. Not a bad bargain!

The Two Boasts

I don't make such promises lightly—-and if I have to boast to get your attention then here goes.

Atkins is the most successful weight loss—and weight maintenance—program of the last quarter of the twentieth century. The fact is, by methods you're about to learn, it works an astonishing proportion of the time for the vast majority of men and women.

Atkins works because it targets our stored body fat. The fat is not there just to make us overweight but is our body's back-up system for fuel ,to generate energy. If we take it out of the back-up position and convert our body to using it as a primary fuel source, the result is an extremely efficient weight loss and weight maintenance program. This switch occurs when only an insignificant amount of carbohydrates, our body's primary fuel, is available. And it's an easy switch to control, because very little glycogen (made from carbohydrate) is stored in our bodies; if we eat fewer carbs, we almost immediately trip the switch.

The Atkins Nutritional Approach can positively impact the lives of people facing the risk factors associated with diabetes, heart disease, and hypertension. It can also alleviate gastrointestinal problems, and certain allergies, chronic pain and immune system weaknesses.

In my clinical practice we treat individuals with optimized diets and vitanutrients. Only a small percentage of patients come to us with weight problems alone. Usually nutritional solutions make the difference that medication alone cannot accomplish.

There is a close relationship between the first boast and the second. Making proper nutritional choices is the largest single component of retaining or restoring good health.

My goal is to make you become a healthy and happy person and to show you bow to stay that way. I will certainly also show you how to lose weight and keep it off forever.

Changing Your Mind Set

Have you bought into the idea that to lose weight and feel good you have to adopt a low-fat diet? If so, the principles and approach I'm about to outline for you might just seem counterintuitive. They certainly do to those who criticize them. But in the ten years since this book was first published, new scientific research has been conducted and published that shows that a controlled carbohydrate nutritional approach is better for you—and for your body than a low-fat, high-carbohydrate nutritional approach.

But let's cut to the chase. Here are three questions you should be asking yourself fight about now:

1. Is this safe?

2. Is this nutritionally sound?

3. Will I keep the weight off once I lose it?

I take these questions, and the misinformation that surrounds the answers, so seriously that I've devoted an entire chapter (Chapter 9) to the myths and misconceptions that have been spread about controlled carbohydrate nutrition. But allow me to tip my hand:

· Safe? Yes, and there is plenty of hard science to back that up. In fact, a number of studies conducted in the past two years (which we will refer to in future chapters) show that a controlled carbohydrate nutritional approach helps improve the clinical parameters affecting heart disease and other illnesses while not causing harm to your liver, kidneys or bone structure.

· Nutritionally sound? Yes, a person following the typical menu and eating foods containing just 20 grams of carbohydrates meets or exceeds the daily recommended allowance of most vitamins and minerals. As you move through the phases of Atkins, you get even more. And that's not according to me, but to analysis using the leading nutritional software program, the one used by most of the practicing nutritionists in this country.

· Keep off all the lost weight? Nothing could be more true. Once you've seen the results and committed yourself to good health you'll realize that it's much easier than you ever thought possible. Because of the types of foods that are part of Atkins, it's actually possible to happily make a change in the way you eat—and look and feel—for good.

The Four Principles of the Atkins Nutritional Approach

By following the Atkins Nutritional Approach for a life-time, you will achieve four things:

A Typical Success Story

Is it hard to keep the pounds off doing Atkins? Tim Wallerdeine doesn't think so.

Blessed with three young children and a happy marriage, Tim started Atkins because he wanted to live to see those kids grow up. At 35 years old, Tim weighed 335 pounds—-far too much even for a strongly built six-footer. His blood pressure was bordorline high; his triglycerides (a risk factor for heart disease) were through the roof.

The day after wife's birthday—they went for a final carbohydrate blowout—Tim started Atkins. Within two weeks, he lost 21 pounds. After four weeks, 34 pounds. "By July 27, 1999, after nine months on the program, I had shed 122 pounds and weighed 213." Without difficulty, enjoying the food and adhering faithfully to Atkins Lifetime Maintenance phase, Tim has stayed right around that weight for two and a half years. Tim's blood pressure normalized. His cholesterol, glucose and triglyceride levels went down—and they've stayed down. The back and neck pain he used to suffer is gone. He exercises regularly today. And, as he emphatically believes, "I'm a bettor dad and husband. My old phrase used to be, 'No, I'm not up for that.' Now I love to play with my children."

Final comments? How about this: "Just the other night, we went out for ice cream to celebrate Ethan's fifth birthday. No, I didn't indulge, and I didn't feel de. prived. I felt alive!"

1. You will lose weight. It's hard not to. Both men and women who follow the Atkins approach to weight loss readily take off pounds and inches. For the small numbets who have a truly hardcore metabolic resistance to weight loss, Chapter 20 will go into detail about how to overcome the barriers that prevent a successful outcome. Optimizing body weight is a valuable element of any health-oriented program because, by and large, being significantly overweight is an indicator of potential health problems, now or in the future. When you've taken the pounds off, you'll see the benefits, and they will be far more than merely cosmetic.

2.You will maintain your weight loss. This is where the Atkins Nutritional Approach leaves most other diets in the dust. Almost every experienced dieter has gone on a diet, worked hard, lost a lot of pounds and gained them all back in a few months or perhaps a year. This is usually due to the expected consequence of low-fat/low-calorie diets—hunger. Although many people can tolerate hunger for a while, very few can tolerate it for a lifetime. Deprivation is no fun. Once the biological gap between hunger and fulfillment grows too large, the rebound can be amazingly rapid as well as heartbreaking and humiliating. But that's the problem of diets that restrict quantities. The Atkins program refuses to accept hunger as a way of life. The plan includes foods that have enough fat and protein so hunger is not the huge issue it is on other weight loss plans. But it still allows dieters to maintain a healthy weight for a lifetime.

3.You will achieve good health. The change is amazing. Doing Atkins, you meet your nutritional needs by eating delicious, healthy, filling foods and avoiding the sugar and carbs that junk food is loaded with. As a result, you become less tired and more energetic, not merely because of the weight loss, but because the physical consequences of a truly dysfunctional blood sugar and insulin metabolism are reversed. Doing Atkins, people start feeling good even before they reach their goal weight. Once they abandon the catastrophic American diet of refined carbohydrates for whole, unrefined food, they start to live again. It's one of the most rewarding experiences I've had the privilege of witnessing with thousands of my patients.

4.You will lay the permanent groundwork for disease prevention. You will change your life, which, believe it or not, is even more important than looking good on the beach next summer. By following an individualized controlled carbohydrate nutritional aptnoach that results in lower insulin production, people at high risk for chronic illnesses such as cardiovascular disease, hypertension and diabetes will see a marked improvement in their clinical parameters. We will explore many of the studies referenced here throughout the later chapters of this book.

Why Is the Atkins Nutritional Approach So Revolutionary and So Right?

The U.S. is the fattest nation in the world. More than sixty percent of Americans are overweight or obese? Yet thirty years ago, it was less than forty percent. Are Americans exceptionally weak-willed? Or could it be that we've developed an extraordinary collective compulsion to become thicker from front to back and wider from side to side than the rest of humanity?

Please don't laugh. You know that isn't the answer. Why are we in the midst of an obesity epidemic?

The obvious answer is that Americans don't eat the types of foods that are consistent with maintaining a normal healthy metabolism. Mankind is not geared to handle an abundance of refined carbohydrates. Losing weight is not a matter of counting calories; it is a matter of eating food your body is able to handle.

Let me place a few facts on the table, all of which we will explore throughout the remainder of this book:

· Most obesity exists when the body's metabolism—the process by which it turns food into fuel—isn't functioning correctly. The more overweight a person is, the more certain is the presence of metabolic disturbance.

· The basis of the metabolic disturbance in obesity doesn't have to do with the fat you eat. It has to do with eating too many carbohydrates, which leads to metabolic problems such as insulin resistance and hyperinsulinism. And these metabolic problems are directly related to your general health picture and your likelihood of being victimized by killers such as diabetes, heart disease and stroke. Moreover, high insulin levels have been associated with a higher incidence of diabetes. (Since Type H diabetics also have high insulin levels, the two epidemics, obesity and diabetes, can quite properly be considered a single epidemic.)

· The metabolic effect resulting from excess insulin production can be circumvented by controlling carbohydrates? When you control your intake of refined carbohydrates, you avoid the foods that cause you to be fat. This metabolic correction is so striking that some of you will be able to lose weight eating a higher number of calories than you've been eating on diets top-heavy in carbohydrates.

· Diets high in carbohydrates are precisely what most overweight people don't need and can't become permaneatly slim on. Low-fat diets are, by their very nature, almost always high-carbohydrate diets and bring on the very problems that they were intended to protect us from.

· Our epidemics of diabetes, heart disease and high blood pressure are very largely the results of our overconsumption of refined carbohydrates and its connection to hyperinsunni.

· The Atkins Nutritional Approach can and has corrected these serious risk factors associated with obesity.

There has been sufficient evidence to make these assertions for more than thirty years now. But the heavy hand of government and such prominent organizations as the United States Department of Agriculture blanketed the nation with messages about low-fat dieting from the 1970s to the present. In fact, U.S. government statistics for this time period clearly demonsuate that along with the dramatic decrease in dietary fat intake (from forty percent to thirty-three percent of our caloric intake) there was also a dramatic increase in the intake of refined carbohydrates, not only sugar but white flour? There is no doubt in my mind that this increase in refined carbohydrates has been spurred by the media attention given to the Food Guide Pyramid, created by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which made six to eleven daily servings of these wheat derivatives the basis of the pyramid. I believe that the Food Guide Pyramid's recommendations have directly contributed to the twin epidemics of obesity and diabetes we now face in this country.

There are many examples in history of things we've thought were true that we eventually really,ed were wrong. Remember, we once were sure the earth was flat. But we learn, make progress and can correct our misstep: Only during the last few years has a significant percentage of Americans begun to question what we've been taught about how to eat

And in just the last year or two, the news media has finally begun reporting the range of scientific studies showing that low-fat/high-carbohydrate diets lead to high levels of insulin and to the number-one risk factor for heart disease, high triglycerides. These studies also reveal that controlled earbohydrate diets reverse these problems in a very large percentage of the population. Many of these important studies are referenced throughout this book.

If you've been overweight for very long, it's almost certain you have a blood sugar or a metabolic disorder. This means that refined carbohydrates—which include sugars, white flour products and junk foods that arc such a whopping proportion of the American diet—-are slow poison to you. Those foods are bad for your health, bad for your energy level, bad for your mental state, bad for your figure. Bad for your career prospects, bad for your sex life, bad for your digestion, bad for your blood chemistry, bad for your heart. What I'm saying is that they're bad.

Different Kinds of Food

Protein in the original Greek means "of first importance." The Greeks had it right Protein—complex chains of amino acids—is the basic building block of life and essential to almost every chemical reaction in the human body. Food rich in protein includes meat, fish, fowl, eggs—most of which contain almost no carbohydrates—and cheese, nuts, and seeds. Many vegetables are also well supplied, but unlike animal foods, don't contain all the essential amino acids.

Fat provides glycerol and essential fatty acids, which the body cannot make. The thirty-year-long campaign against dietary fat is as misguided as it is futile. Fat is found in meat, fish, fowl, dairy products and the oils derived from nuts and seeds and a few vegetables such as avocados. Oils extracted from these foods represent one hundred percent fat and contain no carbohydrates.

Carbohydrate includes sugars and starches that are chains of sugar molecules. Although carbohydrate provides the quickest source of energy, we eat much more of it, by far, than our body needs to be healthy. Vegetables do contain some carbohydrates, but they also contain a wide and wondrous variety of vitamins and minerals. However, you can eat plenty of vegetables with high concentrations Of beneficial nutrients and still control your carbs. On the offer hand, carbohydrates such as those in sugar and white flour contain almost nothing that your body needs in large quantities.

I believe that most of the overweight people in the world are carbohydrate sensitive. Often they're true carbohydrate addicts. They need a metabolic, controlled carbohydrate solution, not a low-fat one.

When I wrote the first edition of this book in 1992, I was hotly indignant over the dietary guidelines that I felt were ruining people's lives. I was very critical of some of the individuals who proposed low-fat weight loss programs, and I apologize, because many of them were sincere in their efforts to help people.

But that doesn't mean there isn't a more effective, healthy alternative to the low-fat diet. Today there is an everincreasing number of medical practitioners who recognize the health benefits of controlled carbohydrate nutrition. But I am not satisfied, and neither should you be, with those practitioners who fail to see that the truly deadly component of American eating is the junk food culture in which we're all brought up.

All this discussion about insulin levels, blood sugar and metabolism may seem complicated to you-right now. in the next few chapters I'll tell you everything you need to know. Then you'll begin to understand why the Atkins Nutritional Approach produces healthy weight loss. Before we go there, though, let me review what you will gain by reading this book from cover to cover:

· On most diets you'll be hungry a fair percentage of the time. This program includes foods that leave you feeling much more full and satisfied.

· On most diets you'll be counting calories. When you do Atkins there's no need for that.

· On most diets you'll never stop eating addictive highcarbohydrate foods. When you do Atkins, you'll quickly learn bow to overcome your addictions.

· On most diets you won't learn how to make a gradual transition to a lifetime maintenance plan. After reading this book, you'll learn how to develop a healthy way to eat that will feel comfortable and natural enough to adopt for good.

You know what I'm going to remind you of next The Atkins Nutritional Approach is not a "diet." In the limiting sense of a weight loss program that you go on and off, it doesn't deserve to be called a diet at all. It's a way of eating for the rest of your (healthy) life.

KEY POINTS!

· The typical American style of eating is grossly mismatched to the normal human metabolism.

· Most obesity is the result of metabolic disturbances, not overconsumption of fat.

· Studies consistently show that sugar, refined white flour and junk foods are bad for your health, your energy level, your mental state and your figure.

· Low-fat diets are in effect high-carbohydrate diets and bring on the very problems that they were intended to protect us from.

· By doing Atkins you will control your weight, achieve health and help prevent disease.

· The Atkins Nutritional Approach is composed of protein and fat, both essential to the human body, plus controlled quantities of the most nutrient-dense carbohydrates, primarily in the form of vegetables.