The Basics of the Atkins Diet

Few diets have quite achieved the notoriety that the atkins diet has achieved. It is a relatively straightforward diet although it recommends eating habits that are quite shocking to most people. It is safe to say that like it or hate it, most people have heard about the atkins diet. It is based on the consumption of protein. The stereotyped thinking would be that proteins would just make people put on weight. That may be true but in this case the proteins are excluding carbohydrates such that you are not really having a balanced diet. One of the most controversial aspects of the diet is that it actually worked. People were losing weight but at the same time being allowed to indulge in eating meat all the time.

The idea diet, right? Well, as expected the negative stories started trickling in. The diet was accused of making people ill. Health experts started joining the long queue to condemn it and the writer was rounded on by the popular press. Meanwhile people continued using the diet and losing the weight. Some simply dropped off the scheme when they realized that there were side effects to be felt if you were able to continue with this diet.

The diet is deceptively luxurious allowing for the indulgence of seemingly luxury goods as long as you do not have basic carbohydrates in your diet. Most people enjoy protein foods but if they are eaten to excess they start becoming boring. You can even end up hating the whole experience altogether. Meat no longer looked quite as appetizing after you have been stuffing yourself with meat for the past five days.
The body also started craving for carbohydrates. They say absence makes the heart grow fonder and this is exactly what happened with the atkins diet. The people on the diet transferred their cravings from sugary foods onto carbohydrates. This led many of them to fail in their quest to achieve dieting perfection. The most worrying aspect of this is that no one did an assessment to see how they could support people who were struggling in this way.

The cost of proteins was also relatively high which meant that people of modest means would struggle to meet the requirements of the diet. However there was a cloud in the silver lining because the people who went on the diet were so fed up of fatty foods that many of them removed them from their normal diets even after they had left the scheme.