Atkins New Diet Revolution

The Atkins Diet is the one that brought low carb dieting to the forefront of the general public's eyes. This is because it works extremely well, and it can often be a very fast way to lose weight too. Many people who follow the Atkins diet properly can lose as much as ten to twenty pounds of body fat each week in the beginning. The very first week though, is usually water weight loss. After that however, the fat starts shedding extremely quickly in some cases, and many other health problems start clearing up as well.

Now the Atkins diet has been quite controversial from the beginning. It made it's first appearance to the world over 30 years ago, but it wasn't until approximately five to ten years ago that it started resurfacing quietly on the Internet. And that caused it to become quite popular with mainstream society for the past several years. The controversy this diet caused though, ended up creating an entire industry of spin off diets. Several similar diets have been launched since Atkins, and many of them are quite similar, but they try to deal with the parts of Atkins that are so controversial.

The most controversial part of the Atkins diet is that it seems to fly in the face of everything healthy people have been taught for a couple of generations now. It says to eat bacon and eggs for breakfast for instance, and that fat is actually good for you but carbs are bad.

There are reasons behind these statements though. It's a bit complicated to explain with just this brief space, but the summary goes something like this: When your body has an overabundance of carbs coming into it constantly, it will burn those carbs for energy. If you don't use all the carbs with your daily activities though, they'll be converted to fat and stored for later use. But since you're constantly adding excessive amounts of carbs to your body, the fat keeps piling up and never gets a chance to burn off.

By drastically reducing the amount of carbs you're eating though, your body is forced to actually start using it's stored fat for energy instead. And once it's able to start using that stored fat, the fat starts being burned very quickly. The reason Atkins says to eat more fat though, is because that helps you to feel full faster, and stay feeling full for longer periods of time. So you're not constantly feeling hungry and deprived, and you're not likely to have the sugar cravings either. According to Atkins, eating fat also "trains" your body to start burning fat instead of carbohydrates, which it no longer has an abundance of.

Some people mistakenly think that Atkins is a no carbohydrate diet though, and that is not the case. Like the South Beach Diet, you restrict your carbohydrate intake dramatically in the beginning - to about 20 grams of carbs each day. This allows your body to cleanse itself of the excess carbs it has on hand, kills the sugar cravings, and gets you into full fat burning mode. As time goes on however, you start adding more carbs back into your daily meals, and like The South Beach diet, carbs in the form of vegetables and fruits are strongly encouraged over breads, pastas and sweets.