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 successful 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 carbohydrates to their diet.

The body switched back to burning the sugars from the carbs while storing fat again. This meant that the weight originally lost soon came back on and no long lasting benefits were gained.

Education is the Answer

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.

Finding Solutions to the Age Old Problem of Losing Weight

The problem of obesity and being overweight is one that has been around as long as people have been around, although not nearly in as great a proportion of the population as it is today.

There are plenty of good reasons why there are more obese people in the world today than at any other time in history most of it has to do with the way we eat.

Finding solutions can be a minefield of misinformation and misdirection where the food industry wants us to be healthy so we can buy their products while at the same time filling the foods they produce with so many artificial additives as to threaten our health and create a situation where people eat more than they need to and then get overweight.

The most obvious solution is to not eat any foods produced by an industry built on making a profit before ensuring the health of their customers.

No One Option

Unfortunately, this is not an option for everyone because not everyone can afford to prepare, cook and eat food made from fresh, wholesome ingredients.

Working mothers don't have the time, so many of them tend to opt for the easy answer in popping a ready-to-eat meal in the microwave for their hungry kids without realizing that they are setting them up to be overweight and even obese in later life.

It is far too easy to order a pizza to go, or head to a hamburger restaurant for a meal than to spend time preparing and cooking an honest home cooked meal. The industry knows this and exploits it, to the detriment of the majority of the population who don't know any better.

Posted on September 24, 2023


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